Letters to living authors

LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS

LETTERS

TO

LIVING AUTHORS

BY

JOHN A. STEUART

AUTHOR OF ' SELF-EXILED,' ETC.

WITH PORTRAITS

LONDON

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON
Limited

FETTER LANE, FLEET STREET, E.G.
1890

[A II rights reserved}

TO

E. HOWARD

THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED

557.179

CONTENTS

PAGE

To MR. GEORGE MEREDITH, .... i

To DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, . . 18

To MR. JOHN RUSKIN, 36

To MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, ... 54

/To COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI, . 70

To MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, . . 85

v To MR. THOMAS HARDY, . . . . 101

To MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, . . 117

To MR. ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, . 131
To MR. HALL CAINE, . . . . .149

To MR. ROBERT Louis STEVENSON, . . 163

vTo MR. ANDREW LANG, 176

To MR. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS, . . 191

To MR. WILLIAM BLACK, .... 207

To MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN, .... 221

To MR. R. D. BLACKMORE, . . . . 236

v To MR. MARK TWAIN, . . . . , 253

The Publishers beg to acknowledge their indebted-
ness to Messrs. ELLIOTT & FRY for permission to
copy many of their Portraits of Authors given in
this Volume.

GKORGK MEREDITH.

LETTERS
TO LIVING AUTHORS.

To MR. GEORGE MEREDITH.

SIR, — There is a certain quality which, more
than talent, or genius, or energy, or force of
will, lies at the bottom of all material success —
the quality which is known among men as
worldly wisdom. You can scarcely be con-
gratulated on possessing it, for throughout your
career you have shown less concern for the
comfort and convenience of your patrons, the
public, than any other literary caterer living to-
day. Indeed, with the exception of Carlyle,
no British writer of this generation has been so
utterly regardless of the ease of the critics and
the pleasure of the general reader. You seem
A

2 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

perfectly oblivious of the fact that novels,
whether written for recreation or not, are, as a
rule,, most assuredly read for recreation ; and
that a work of fiction which does not primarily
please, apart from its literary merits, stands but
a meagre chance of being read at all. The
business of life is not popularly supposed to lie
in solving enigmas and puzzling the brain over
paradoxes. The British nation is chary — very
chary — of making exorbitant demands on its
head, especially in matters designed for its en-
tertainment. It has a natural aptitude for
enjoyment, and likes to have things made easy
for it. Would you be admonished, and gain
the popular vote ? Then trouble the reader
less with profound intellectual problems ; do
not so strenuously insist on his fathoming the
great deeps of philosophy ; let the world wag,
since it is so careless of its destiny ; in a word,
assume the jaunty indifference to all things
serious which is so pleasing a characteristic of
Mayfair, and study the tastes rather than the
needs of mankind.

Most writers, I believe, start with high moral
and aesthetic aims. They will regenerate the

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 3

graceless sons of Adam ; they will wipe away
the grime of thousands of years of wickedness,
and establish the love of the noble and the
beautiful. But they speedily discover that the
ungrateful sons of Adam have really no desire
to be regenerated ; they are content to continue
sinful, and read sensational books full of wild
adventure and intrigue and gore and all the
other reprehensible things that are of so sweet
a savour to the depraved and vulgar palate.
And so the majority of our authors, having an
eye to results, prescribe and supply, not so much
what is needed, as what is demanded.

You are an exception. You have been
quixotical enough to remain steadfastly true to
your early ideals. You have given the world,
not what it wanted, but what you thought was
good for it. You have put intellect into every
sentence you have written, reckless of conse-
quences, therein departing very far indeed from
the glorious traditions of English fiction. To
say the truth, I think you have been too lofty
in your contempt of the rights and prerogatives
of that well-meaning and not ill-deserving, if
not very intelligent, individual, the habitual

4 LETTERS 7V LIVING AUTHORS.

novel reader. Other novelists may occasionally
take the bit between their teeth, as it were, and
indulge in a gallop to please themselves, but
they quickly slacken down to the conventional
ambling pace, and make everything comfortable
for the party in the saddle. To change the
metaphor, they mostly dilute their draught of
thought to suit the taste of consumers ; but
you stubbornly persist in for ever giving yours
over-proof, perfectly indifferent if people turn
away gasping. That is not the way to be
popular, and indeed you are at opposite poles
from one's ideal of a popular writer.

Your only commodity is thought, which is
not in any great demand in the present era.
You made a mistake at the beginning, and, less
discriminating than many who are your inferiors,
you have never seen it. All along you have
gone on the assumption that the world is craving
for more light, whereas it is rather obscuration
and forgetfulness it is seeking. You fancied
that on certain weighty and perplexing pro-
blems, which lay very near your heart, mankind
was pining for enlightenment, and, with the
noble audacity of a generous and gifted soul,

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 5

you undertook to make things clear ; and you
have succeeded but too well. That is, you
have led the reading public to understand that
you are a moral and social reformer, and not a
story-teller. But for the ample proof to the
contrary contained in your works, your policy
might lead one to think that you know little or
nothing of human nature. Your course, in a
worldly sense, has been the height of inexpedi-
ency. You have forgotten, or ignored, or were
never aware of a fact well known to, and gener-
ally sedulously kept in mind by, every one
whose fortune hangs on the public taste, — that
the world, even in its direst straits, can hardly
be induced to take medicine, except in the
form of confections. You might very well have
begun by putting your drugs in sweetmeats.
In other words, you might have made your
debut with bland and easy commonplace. We
pride ourselves upon being a practical and
commonplace people, — who hold transcenden-
talism in contempt; and depend upon it the
man who ministers to our taste will not be
without his reward. And you might have
had your reward if, instead of following your

6 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

own inclination, you had bent a little more
to ours. But you persevered in your head-
strong course, and the result has been pre-
cisely what might have been anticipated — you
frightened those whom you sought to bene-
fit— so that by the great mass of readers you
are still regarded with terror. Very condign
punishment indeed overtook you for your rash-
ness ; for hardly during the present century has
any writer of your intellectual force and fine
imaginative power been so long and cruelly
neglected. When. writers, without a twentieth
part of your gifts or your culture, have been
shooting aloft into fortune, and what is tempo-
rarily taken for fame, you have remained toiling
in comparative obscurity, no doubt eagerly
panting for appreciation, yet determined to bate
not one jot of your independence, or in the
smallest particular prove a traitor to your ideal.
Happily there are signs that the long-delayed
victory is coming at last, that you are gaining
recognition, or, to use a cant phrase of criticism,
that you ' are swimming into the ken of cul-
ture.'

Mr. Besant, in speaking of the hardships of

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 7

poor Richard Jefferies, says that it must ulti-
mately be destructive of the highest genius to
toil year after year without reward or recognition.
He is of opinion that in order to do his best an
author must be praised. I don't think it would
be hard to show that Mr. Besant is mistaken.
At any rate there are a great many excep-
tions to the rule he would establish. Without
going far afield, we have Wordsworth and Carlyle
and yourself toiling for many years neglected,
or noticed only to be derided, and yet produc-
ing works of supreme excellence. When Words-
worth wrote his Ode to Immortality, he was
not earning enough by his literary labours to
buy salt for his porridge (it goes as a matter of
course that such a lover of simplicity took por-
ridge) ; when Carlyle produced his French
Revolution, it was with some dubitation that
the publishers accepted the manuscript ; and
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel was written
long before your name had any potency in the
republic of letters. It is hard, however, to bear
neglect, and you must have had a fine faith in
your own intellectual endowments, and the ulti-
mate appreciation of mankind, to have continued

8 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

the battle so long. But fortunately for the
name of England you have now a large num-
ber of admirers, a number which is every day
increasing, and which no doubt will go on in-
creasing till you take your right place in the
literature of your country.

It is a significant fact that while you are ad-
mired, and even worshipped, you have not, so
far as I know, been imitated. Certain peculiari-
ties of your style are, indeed, creeping into some
of our latter-day novels ; but your modes of
thought, your manner of treatment, your bril-
liancy of expression, all that is essentially and
particularly George Meredith, has been left most
severely alone, and for very obvious reasons.
Not to speak of the difficulty of copying you
(which would be considerable), your style in
general is not one to be imitated by the tyro
aiming at popularity. ' Some styles,' says Pro-
fessor Teufelsdrockh, ' are lean, adust, wiry, the
muscle itself seems osseous; some are even
quite pallid, hunger-bitten, and dead-looking;
while others glow in the flush of health and
vigorous self-growth, sometimes (as in my own
casie) not without an apoplectic tendency.'

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 9

Yours may be called the apoplectic style, for it
is never for one moment to be depended upon.
It is jerky, irruptive, full of inequalities. The
reader never knows whether he is to be led
across flowery meads, or by winding paths
through bosky groves, or hurled over a precipice.
At times — particularly at the beginning of a book
— the manner is so stiff, so rugged, so difficult,
that only one who knows what is ahead would
persevere. Take for instance the opening of
The Egoist. It is brilliant, keenly intellectual,
full of fine thought and sharp-cut phrases, of wit,
of humour, of satire, of every quality, in fact, that
ought to make it popular, and yet it is far from
being easy reading. It has nothing of the ease
that lures, the softness that enchants, the grace
that captivates. It were an interesting problem
to solve how one who is always so brilliant can
be occasionally so repellent. The beginning of
The Egoist is as discouraging as the begin-
ning of Sartor Resartus, and indeed reminds
one of that now much lauded, though still little
read, book. The dissertation on the Comic
Muse is admirable and terrible. An ordinary
reader would never wade through that superb

io LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

first chapter, nor would he (or is it she ? ) be able
to understand it if he were to read it a score of
times. There, and elsewhere throughout your
books, one is haunted by the suspicion that you
have mistaken your vocation, that you should
have taken to some other department of litera-
ture ; to history or philosophy or criticism, to
anything but story-telling. And you are too
fond of making the reader pant after you till he
is out of breath if not out of temper. What is
an ordinary mortal to make of a sentence like
the following ? —

' As when the foreman of a sentimental jury
is commissioned to inform an awful bench,
exact in perspicuous English, of a verdict that
must of necessity be produced in favour of the
hanging of the culprit, yet would fain attenu-
ate the crime of a palpable villain by a recom-
mendation to mercy, such foreman, standing in
the attentive eye of a master of grammatical
construction, and feeling the weight of at least
three sentences on his brain, together with a
prospect of judicial interrogation for the dis-
covery of his precise meaning, is oppressed,
himself is put on trial in turn, and he hesitates,

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 11

he recapitulates, the fear of involution leads him
to be involved ; as far as a man so posted may,
he on his own behalf appeals for mercy, entreats
that his indistinct statement of preposterous
reasons may be taken for understood, and would
gladly, were permission to do it credible, throw
in an imploring word that he may sink back
among the crowd, without for one imperishable
moment publicly swinging in his lordship's
estimation : — much so, moved by chivalry for a
lady, courtesy to the recollection of a hostess,
and particularly by the knowledge that his
hearer would expect with a certain frigid rigour
charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke
and paused, he stammered.'

And the reader is likely to do the same, and
to use strong language when he recovers his
breath and his self-possession. Would you find
a sentence like that in the work of any popular
pet, supposing our popular pets capable of
writing it ? Hardly. It is as bad as Carlyle in
his most contemptuous mood, when his aim is
to irritate and confuse.

But while you are guilty of these indiscretions,
it must be admitted that you have always one

12 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

great excellence. As a phrase-maker you have
scarcely any living equal, certainly no living
superior. You can illuminate a character or a
scene in a sentence, and many excellent pro-
verbs might be culled from your writings.

' She is clever,' says Clara Middleton of Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson ; * she could tattoo me
with epigrams.' Which is true. You shower
your epigrams about as if they came to you as
easily as the dewdrops to the grass. Pope him-
self does not coruscate more continuously or
brilliantly.

' You are cold, my love ; you shivered,' says
the Egoist.

' I am not cold,' answers the wretched Clara.
' Some one, I suppose, was walking over my
grave.'

As suggestive a sentence, I think, as there is
in all fiction. Then one scarcely knows whether
most to admire your wit or your wisdom.

'A pigmy's a giant if he can manage to
arrive in season,' is, one would say, a sentence
that is destined to live.

* No one?' she said, ' am I alone in the house?'

' There is a figure naught,' said he, ' but it 's as

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 13

good as annihilated, and no figure at all, if you
put yourself on the wrong side of it.' A very
pretty piece of wit, as Mr. Stevenson would say.

Again : ' He was the very sea-wind for bracing
unstrung nerves ' gives as succinct a description
of a strong-minded individual as one could well
have ; while Mrs. Berry's saying that ' it 's al'ays
the plan in a dielemmer to pray God and walk
forward ' is as sound a bit of moral philosophy
as ever came out of a pulpit. But your good
things are not to be picked out like plums from
a pudding. They lie so thick that any attempt
to extract them must prove futile.

Your success as a wit and phrase-maker, how-
ever, exposes you to a danger which you have
yourself well described through one of your
characters. ' You see how easy it is to deceive
one who is an artist in phrases. Avoid them,
Miss Dale, they puzzle the penetration of the
composer. That is why people of ability like
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson ' (and Mr. George
Meredith) ' see so little ; they are so bent on
describing brilliantly.'

Excessive brilliance is rather an unusual com-
plaint, but it is one from which you frequently

i4 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

suffer. You are too witty to be entirely true to
nature, for nature is rather economical in that
respect ; and so, though not precisely for the
same reason, are most novelists. But with you
every boor is a wit, every rustic maid a potential
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson. It is delightfully
stimulating to the reader, but it is not human
nature, a fact which no one knows better than
the sinner himself.

This leads to a consideration of how you
fulfil the prime function of the novelist — in
other words, how you draw character in general.
After all, it matters little how magnificent the
achievements of a dramatist or novelist be in
other respects, if he fail in characterisation he
may justly be said to fail in all, because he fails
in the first essential of his art. It is the
crowning distinction of Shakespeare that he is
the best of all portrait-painters; that every
sentence, every word uttered by his characters
makes the self-revelation the clearer. And,
indeed, the same is true, in a lesser degree, of
all the great masters of humanity, of Cervantes,
of Scott, of Goethe, of Fielding, of Balzac, of
Hawthorne, and the whole illustrious band who

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 15

discover to us the secrets of the soul. Now you
draw character as you do most other things —
well ; but you are not so eminently, or rather
pre-eminently, successful in that line as in some
others. The cause, as you will forgive me for
saying, is, of course, primarily limitation of
faculty. You remember Addison's (or was it
Dick Steele's) illustration of the midwife. A
writer cannot give what he hasn't got, and he
shouldn't be censured for not giving it. But in
your case the reason is not wholly limitation of
faculty. I have already said that you suffer
from excessive brilliancy, and I repeat it with
emphasis, with tremenjous emphasis, as Arte-
mus Ward would say. Your merit is your
defect. Your wit is, in all seriousness, often
your bane. In the dazzle of your own bright-
ness you are blinded to the qualities of ordi-
nary human nature. Clever people you can
delineate with anybody, dead or living; but
clever people are the few in this world, and
dolts are the many; and in consequence of
your scorn or ignorance of the latter, instead
of drawing broad human nature, as Scott does,
for example, you draw glittering bits here and

1 6 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

there, very beautiful, very attractive, stimulat-
ing, altogether delightful in themselves, but
giving little more conception of humanity at
large than a shooting-star gives of the mysteries
of the Solar System, or a piece of sparkling
mineral of the wonders of geology. You
draw English peasants, for instance, and it is
only necessary to compare them to Thomas
Hardy's to gauge your success. Mr. Hardy
gives us the real true blue — the identical chaw-
bacon — who is the backbone of our beloved
England ; you give the noble animal after he
has undergone a clarifying process, and, as the
Scottish people say, ' learned some wut.' On
the other hand, there are certain strong types of
character which you draw with a power which
is perhaps unmatched among contemporary
English novelists. Sir Willoughby Patterne is
one of the most magnificent studies in the whole
range of literature. No one who has not read
the Egoist can fully understand the meaning
of selfishness and conceit. But for myself,
much as I admire the splendours of the Egoist,
highly as I delight in Diana of the Crossways,
and Rhoda Fleming, I prefer Richard Fever el.

MR. GEORGE MEREDITH. 17

I should be inclined, indeed, to say it is your
high-water mark in fiction. It has more
humour than is common with you, and also
more tenderness. Clare's Diary and the death
of Lucy are very affecting, perhaps because of
the admirable reticence. How Dickens would
have squeezed the sponge in those scenes !
Then for humour there is the scamp Adrian,
and the escapades of the boys Richard and
Ripton. I think you could have written a
good boy's book. (I don't mean a book for
good boys.) And for general strength there is
Sir Austin, fit to stand beside Sir Willoughby—
a great, strong, blind character, blind even to
the last, and in the midst of that frightful
tragedy which was the logical outcome of his
' System.' I would have that book placed in
the hand of every father in the land with a son
whose welfare — moral, mental, and material —
is dear to him ; and I would have readers in
general (and moral reformers in particular) put
through a course of Mr. George Meredith.

To DR. OLIVER WENDELL
HOLMES.

SIR, — Mr. Swinburne says somewhere that
the most beloved of all English writers may be
Goldsmith or may be Scott, but the best beloved
will always be Charles Lamb. It may be that
among American men of letters you are not the
most beloved, but I venture to say that there
are few, if any, better beloved. Since you rode
into fame in that * Wonderful One-hoss Shay,'
with all the world laughing and huzzaing at
your heels, you have kept the affections of the
peoples of two hemispheres, without lapse and
without diminution. Few authors have ever,
in their own lifetime, enjoyed so long a lease of
unbroken popularity. There have been writers
who have risen higher than you in the popular
esteem, but most of them were only a kind of
literary rockets, that have burned for a moment
in the eyes of all men, then fallen and gone out

18

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 19

with a hiss and a sputter, leaving one to wonder
at the laws which govern such erratic and alto-
gether inexplicable creations. It were a curious
and interesting and instructive study to trace
the waxing and waning reputations of the past
half-century, to count the number of pseudo-
geniuses who have gone up at the tail of a
newspaper kite, to borrow a happy phrase from
Mr. Lowell, and come down headlong with the
velocity of the first arch-sinner to demonstrate
how very perilous those aerial flights are to them
who have nothing in the shape of natural wings
should anything go wrong with the kite. Since
the beginning of your career as an author many
meteors, to use a somewhat worn but apt and
expressive metaphor, have shot out of darkness,
flashed brilliantly against the sky, and, ere the
critics could adjust their glasses to determine
what the dazzling phenomena might be, have
gone out, leaving only darkness again, and
perhaps a suggestion of sulphur or gunpowder.
Much of this you have seen on all hands. You
have beheld the promising one, the new poet
or the new novelist, soar higher and higher, till
the eye was, perhaps, pained and the head dizzy

20 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

watching him, or her ; and then all at once you
might perceive a tremulous motion, a flutter of
the plumage, as it were, a sign of waning force,
as if the gas in the balloon were exhausted, and
then, suddenly, the inevitable straight-down
descent. And while this upward and down-
ward rush has been going on, to the general
confusion of mankind, you have held along the
pleasant leafy ways of goodly prosperity, never
anxious to rise into unnatural altitudes, but
always careful to keep out of the ditches, com-
paratively careless of the company of the gods,
but ever on good terms with well-dressed, well-
to-do, well-mannered men and women. You
move along like a prosperous, good-humoured
man of the world, cracking a joke here and
there, letting fall, at the proper intervals, de-
lightful morsels of wisdom, so made up and
disguised that they shall be taken as confec-
tions ; not sweet enough, however, to nauseate,
nor heavy enough to cause an attack of dys-
pepsia. You are not commonplace, and you
are not " eccentric. You have as little of the
doleful gravity of the platitudinarian as of the
theatrical spirit of the mountebank or the

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 21

juggler (all of whom flourish in literature in
this singular era) : your zeal or your vanity is
not so great that you carry anything to excess.
You believe in — and, what is more, practise —
the golden mean in all things. And this is one
cause of your long-continued popularity.

Another cause is that you are one of the most
companionable writers in the world — that is,
one of the most genial. The sour may say
what they like, but the world, as a whole, is in-
clined to be agreeable, if only treated cour-
teously and fairly. You have the happy knack
of pleasing, and on almost all subjects. It is a
knack which is not always an attribute of genius.
There have been great men who were not plea-
sant men. Many well-intentioned folks spoil a
truth by their manner of enforcing it. Their
truculency raises a spirit of opposition. There
is so much of the schoolmaster in their mien
that one is for ever expecting to see the birch-
rod, and the anxiety to protect the knuckles
diverts one's mind from the lesson. The olive-
branch may be in front, but one always suspects
that there is a sharp switch, or, perhaps, even a
cudgel, behind. Truth and morality have little

22 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

chance under such circumstances. Then there
are many teachers and moral philosophers who,
while not absolutely truculent, are disconcert-
ingly austere. Mr. Lowell neatly observes in
one of his essays that Milton was not a man to
be slapped on the back. No, the great Puritan
poet, whatever his other qualities may have
been, was not remarkable for his sociability.
And, since his day, other moral dignitaries and
grandees, whose virtues we are all ready to
admit, and even to extol when we are not asked
nor expected to emulate them, have been so
dreadfully severe, so exacting, so illiberal in
allowing for the inherited frailties of common
humanity, that — well, that we would rather
shun their presence if possible. Their ethical
codes may be excellent, but their manner is
chilly, as if they had passed their youth on ice-
bergs, and had been incurably affected with cold.
With you, who are likewise a teacher, it is
wholly different. Warmth and brotherly feeling
pervade all you say. You have not that supe-
rior consciousness of self-immaculateness which
overawes and frightens the humble inquirer in
reading the writings of so many estimable authors.

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 23

You convey your morals jocosely, and as it
were inadvertently, so that the patient swallows
the medicine almost without being aware of it.
This dexterity, or this geniality, or both com-
bined, have made people look on you as a
humorist pure and simple. Mr. George
Augustus Sala calls you ' a funny fellow, a
very funny fellow.' I own the description does
not much please me. It is true, to be sure, as
far as it goes, but it does not go far enough.
It is apt to give the impression that you aim
only at being ' funny,3 like Mr. William Nye,
whose jokes remind one of the Scotsman's,
inasmuch as they are delivered with 'great
defeeculty'; or like Mark Twain, in whose
work, too, the labour is often much more
apparent than the humour. ' Nothing can be
more galling to a man's self-respect than to be
considered a mere jester,' says a famous country-
man of yours. Nothing surely, and you long
since saw this. * If the sense of the ridiculous,'
you say in one place, ' is one side of an impress-
ible nature, it is very well ; but if that is all
there is in a man, he had better have been an
ape at once, and so have stood at the head of

24 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

his profession. Laughter and tears are meant
to turn the wheels of the same machinery of
sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other
water-power, that is all. . . . Do you know
that you feel a little superior to every man who
makes you laugh, whether by making faces or
verses ? Are you aware that you have a plea-
sant sense of patronising him, when you con-
descend so far as to let him turn somersets ;
literal or literary, for your royal delight ? ' Quite
true : professional jesting lowers a man, and to
describe you as a funny fellow, and nothing
more, may be the truth, but it is not the whole
truth. That you are a humorist, and a humorist
of the first water, none will deny. I take it that
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table is one of
the most genuinely humorous books written by
any living author. Yet I think there is more
than mere humour in it. Let us see. Says
the Autocrat, in illustrating the helplessness of
men : ' Do you want an image of the human
will or the self-determining principle, as com-
pared with its pre-arranged and impassable re-
strictions?— A drop of water imprisoned in a
crystal ; you may see such a one in any mine-

/M'. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 25

ralogical collection. One little fluid particle in
the crystalline prism of the solid universe.' It
could hardly be better put. There is something
there beyond the reach of most humorists.
Again, ' I find the great thing in this world is
not so much where we stand, as in what direc-
tion we are moving. To reach the port of
Heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind
and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and
not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very
sad thing in old friendships, to every mind
which is moving onward. It is this : that one
cannot help using his early friends, as the sea-
man uses the log, to mark his progress.' Those
depths were never fathomed by the professional
* funny man.' Nor did he ever give such speci-
mens of condensation as these : ' Every real
thought on every subject knocks the wind out
of somebody or other.' * Sin has many tools,
but a lie is the handle which fits them all.'
And so I might go on multiplying instances to
the confusion of Mr. Sala, and of all others who
look on you as a mere humorist.

Mr. Haweis is nearer the mark in saying that
' Holmes is one of the few survivors of that

26 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

chosen band of native thinkers and writers who
have created American literature. ... To
the pleasures of money they have added the
pleasures of imagination ; to the glories of trade
and commerce they brought the worship of
nature, the gift of the seeing eye, the sensitive
heart, the uplifted soul.' There is no exaggera-
tion there. You are a good deal more than a
jester ; you are a thinker, as every writer must
be who is to do more than satisfy a passing
need, or pander to a peculiar craze for the sake
of the wages. Moreover, you are a charming
poet and an effective story-teller. Not that I
would place you in the very front rank among
Transatlantic writers, either as a poet or a
novelist. Criticism is nothing at all if it be not
honest, and my conscience compels me to give
you only a second place in either class. One
must not forget that among the divine singers
of America are Whittier and Lowell, and among
its story-tellers Hawthorne and Poe. It is diffi-
cult to stand beside any one of the quartet
without feeling more or less overshadowed. I
dare say you would be the last man in the world
to claim equality with the author of The Scarlet

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 27

Letter and The House of the Seven Gables on
the one hand, or with the author of Snow-
Bound and Home Ballads and Poems on the
other. Whittier seems to me one of the truest
and greatest sons of song whom this century has
produced ; and, in his own line, Hawthorne is,
in many respects, unrivalled. It will be a long
time, I fear, before we get another Scarlet Letter.
It is, in my estimation, the masterpiece of
American literature, so far, and it remains a
masterpiece in the literature of the world.

I do not think that so much could truthfully
be said of anything you have done in fiction.
You have not gone down into the deep places
of the soul as Hawthorne has done. Yet you
have touched some very deep springs, and shown
that when you concentrate yourself you can not
only be pathetic, but tragic ; you can not only
draw tears, but you can paint that misery which
is beyond the reach and the region of tears.
There are parts of Elsie Venner, that marvellous
romance of destiny, in which the tragedy is as
strong as most readers would care to have it,
and stronger than many could bear. Elsie is a
wonderful, a powerful, and a telling study, which,

28 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

were it not for its pathological element, would
rank with the very best in the fiction of this
generation. 'Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by
the venom of a crotalus before she was born,
morally responsible for the volitional aberra-
tions which, translated into acts, become what is
known as sin, and, it may be, what is punished
as crime ? ' The question is an interesting and
pertinent one, but in trying to answer it you
make art suffer at the hand of science. Haw-
thorne, as you have yourself noticed, has a some-
what similar study in The Marble Faun, and
he, likewise, with all his penetration and ima-
gination, fails. Indeed, his failure is signal.
There is confusion ; the elements of character,
which he endeavours to combine, are too diverse
to coalesce in one congruous and artistic whole.
The fact is, such studies are properly outside
the scope of art. It is not really the province
of art to meddle with inherited disease ; and
you, in doing it, were acting more in your scien-
tific than in your artistic capacity. The novelist
had not quite mastered the doctor. The greatest
creations of genius are not founded on insanity.
Is Hamlet mad, think you ? If he is, or was,

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 29

his madness had a great deal of method in it.
Ophelia was mad, and so was Lear ; but Shake-
speare is careful in both cases to show it was
the world, and not inherited disease, that had
brought on their insanity. So much said, how-
ever, one would be hard to please who cavilled
much at Elsie Vernier. As a story I do not
think the artistic blemish to which I have re-
ferred at all mars its interest. Nay, to many,
I dare say, it will be an additional source of
interest to watch the mental and physical par-
oxysms of the doomed girl— doomed through
no fault of her own, but through a prenatal
occurrence in which she had no share except in
its consequence. One feels acutely for Elsie.
She is a terrible study, and yet there is something
soft and lovable in her. Hard, solitary, and
self-centred as she seems, her heart did once go
out to a fellow-being ; but, alas ! the love, which
was truly a passion, was not returned, and Elsie
curls up within herself again, more dangerous
to herself and all about her than ever before.
When the reader finds that Bernard Langdon
does not return the girl's affection, he feels in-
stinctively that she is doomed. Her one chance

30 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

has miscarried, and there is nothing to look
forward to but a tragedy worse than death.
The other characters in Elsie Vernier are livingly
drawn. Dr. Kitterage is a fine old fellow ; and
I should say that Mr. Silas Peckham, Principal
of the Apollinean Institute, is the meanest man
in American fiction. Helen Darley is a sweet
creation, and makes a striking contrast to Elsie.
I should be disposed to think, however, that
of all the stories you have written that of Iris in
The Professor at the Breakfast Table would be
the favourite with the general reader. It is very
simple, very unpretentious, very touching ; true
in every line, every sentiment, and delightfully
humorous until the darkness begins to gather
at the close ; then, like life when there is only
a backward prospect, it grows stern for a little,
only, however, to soften into tender beauty again
as the sun sinks. The final impression is one
of peace and repose. Certain of your critics
have found this ' the most delicate as well as
the most powerful * of your works ; and that
opinion, while much admiring your other stories,
I am inclined, on the whole, to indorse. It is
not so elaborate as Elsie Venner or A Mortal

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 31

Antipathy, but I think it is sweeter than either,
and surpasses both in fulness and strength of
purely human interest. Iris herself, though
slightly sketched, is a charming creation, and
she gains by her contact with the deformed little
gentleman. The latter is a very pathetic charac-
ter, especially in that little love-scene at the
close. That speech of his when the divinity
student comes to ask him if he is prepared for
the future is one not to be forgotten. ' " I am
not a man, sir," said the little gentleman — " I
was born into this world the wreck of a man,
and I shall not be judged with a race to which I
do not belong. Look at this ! " he said, and
held up his withered arm — " see there ! " and
he pointed to his misshapen extremities. " Lay
your hand here ! " and he laid his own on the
region of his misplaced heart. " I have known
nothing of the life of your race. When I first
came to consciousness, I found myself an object
of pity or a sight to show. . . . My life is
the dying pang of a worn-out race, and I shall
go down alone into the dust, out of this world
of men and women, without ever knowing the
fellowship of the one or the love of the other.

32 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

1 will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
If another state of being has anything worse in
store for me, I have had a long apprenticeship
to give me strength that I can bear it. I don't
believe it, sir. I have too much faith for that." '
In the midst of his speech Iris bends over him
and kisses him — him who had never had a kiss
or caress of affection since his mother had left
him. ' " Shall I pray with you ? " said the
divinity student, after a pause. A little before
he would have said, " Shall I pray for you ? "
The Christian religion, as taught by its Founder,
is full of sentiment, so we must not blame the
divinity student if he was overcome by those
yearnings of human sympathy which predomi-
nate so much more in the sermons of the Master
than in the writings of His successors, and which
have made the parable of the Prodigal Son the
consolation of mankind, as it has been the
stumblingblock of all exclusive doctrines.'
And the divinity student prays, meekly trusting
the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
Parent who does not fail to smooth the way.
Those who have yet to make your acquaint-
ance I should advise to get the story of Iris

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 33

and read it, as a piece of genuine and touching
sentiment, as a piece, also, of genuine and
delightful humour.

The qualities which distinguish a writer's prose
must, of necessity, if he be true to himself, mark
his poetry also. Both in prose and verse you are
essentially the same — the same keen observer,
the same humorous commentator, the same
genial companion, the same sterling friend of
humanity. As a poet and as a story-teller you
have the same lightness of touch, the same
fascinating method of pointing a moral and
adorning a tale; in a word, you are yourself
whatever you write ; so that your poetry need
not be gone into at any length here. This
much let me say, however, that in your poetic
attempts you are always a poet. It has been
your happy fortune to be able to ignore your
own counsel to the literary or poetic tyro : —

' Don't mind if the index of sense is at zero,
Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean ;
Leander, and Lilian, and Lillibullero,
Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine.'

I think you have very emphatically falsified
your own facetious dictum.
c

34 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Perhaps nothing concerning you is more
remarkable than the cheerful, hopeful philosophy
which sustains you in the evening of life. You
have always been a buoyant writer, and your
buoyancy is no less evident now than it was
half a century ago. I will not say that your
spirits are as high at eighty as they were at
thirty — that were an unreasonable thing to
expect, but I will say that few writers of your
years have ever shown themselves so sunny.
In * Before the Curfew ' there is the inevitable
note of sadness, but there is no wail such as we
so often hear from octogenarians. You can
anticipate the ringing of the curfew, the putting
out of the fire, with that calmness which is, per-
haps, the most beautiful characteristic of old age,
as it is certainly the best reward of a long life.
There is subdued pathos, but no repining ; least
of all is there any quarrelling with the inevitable.

' Not bedtime yet ! The full-blown flower
Of all the year — this evening hour —

With friendship's flame is bright ;
Life still is sweet, the heavens are fair,
Though fields are brown and woods are bare,
And many a joy is left to share

Before we say good-night !

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 35

And when, our cheerful evening past,
The nurse, long waiting, comes at last,

Ere on her lap we lie —
In wearied nature's sweet repose,
At peace with all her waking foes,
Our lips shall murmur ere they close,

Good-night ! and not good-bye.'

That is too beautiful for comment.

To MR. JOHN RUSKIN.

SIR, — Not long ago I read an article in a
popular monthly magazine, signed by a well-
known American artist, which proved, to the
writer's entire satisfaction, that the world is
miserably mistaken in considering you a reliable
authority on Art. Your claims as an Art critic
he ridiculed most mercilessly, and, having
laughed to his heart's content, he boldly pro-
ceeded to assault and battery. No iconoclast
was ever half so sweeping and destructive as
this ingenuous child of nature from the illimit-
able prairies of the great West. To say that he
left you not a leg to stand on would be but
feebly describing the completeness of his act of
demolition. Not satisfied with simply knock-
ing' you down, he danced on you, pulverised
you, as it were; and then, when the terrible
work was done, he smiled the triumphant smile
of a Roman gladiator viewing the gory corse of

JOHN RUSKIN.

MR. JOHN R US KIN. 37

an antagonist. I remember that he specially
singled out for ridicule that celebrated descrip-
tion of Turner's ' Slave Ship ' in Modern
Painters. I had read that passage before read-
ing the article of the artist, and was weak and
illiterate enough to think it magnificent. To
say the truth, I thought it a good deal better
than the picture it professed to describe, giving
rather what the painter might have had in his
mind's-eye, than what he succeeded in putting
on canvas. But it was no blemish to my mind
that it took more out of the picture than is
really in it ; nay, its superb exaggeration made
it, to me, one of the finest pieces of work
in all our English literature — so fine, indeed,
did it seem to me that what must I do but
get it off by heart, like Byron's address to
the ocean, Portia's speech on the quality of
mercy, Burke's fantasy about Marie Antoinette,
De Quincey's description of a stage-coach, Car-
lyle's panegyric on the nobility of labour, and
such like passages, which are admired either for
beauty of diction, or loftiness and vigour of
thought. But after reading that magazine
article I felt as if I had been wasting my time

38 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

imbibing wrong ideas. The writer did not, in-
deed, deny your power as a rhetorician. He
was so good as to acknowledge that you had a
marvellous mastery over words ; that your gift
of expression was in every way superb ; that you
had great emotional fervour ; and, he supposed,
a certain melody of style which captivated the
ear. But he said that your gifts in the matter
of style only made you the more unreliable as a
guide to uneducated persons seeking some
knowledge of Art ; and he went on to analyse
your description of Turner's ' Slave Ship,' and to
expose its fallacies. He asked, for instance,—
and there was the scorn of victory in his tone, —
how anything could lose itself ' in the hollow of
the night'; and he showed that you had intro-
duced your most admired passages, not for the
sake of truth, but for the sake of alliteration.
Finally, he said that as neither you nor Turner
had ever seen the deep sea, either in storm or
calm, you could not possibly know anything
about it. You were both dealing with vague
generalities which had as much to do with the
ocean as with the desert or the mountain ; and
you, as critic, were praising, as high excellences

MR. JOHN R US KIN. 39

in the work of Turner, that which does not exist
in reality, never did exist, and never can exist,
so long as the laws of Nature remain what they
are. This, as you may suppose, was staggering
to one who had always thought that thorough-
ness and accuracy were the special features of
your work. To be told that you were writing
about things concerning which you were totally
ignorant, was a blow from which I did not at
once recover.

But more startling revelations were in store.
Scarcely had I got over the confusion into
which the Yankee artist had thrown me, when
I chanced to read the report of a speech de-
livered to a provincial audience by a ' dis-
tinguished ' member of the British Parliament.
The honourable member had evidently just been
making himself up in political economy, and,
as ill fortune would have it, had read what you
have to say on the ' dismal science.' He in-
stantly fell foul of you, and, with that consum-
mate art of which members of the British Par-
liament are masters, he entertained his auditors
with witty remarks on your fantastic notions of
what is good for the State, and — I write it with

40 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

awe — your colossal ignorance. It was a great
effort, and he carried the whole house with him.
The speech, according to the reporters (who are
always impartial and veracious), was pointed
with ' screams of laughter ' and * roars of ap-
plause ' — all, as you will understand, at your ex-
pense. You sneered at the principles of political
economy as laid down by political economists,
said the distinguished member of the House of
Commons, and what were you, pray ? ' A man
who found fault with the smoke of factories, and
who would abolish railways ; a man who would
rather see an old daub of a picture, for which
no right-minded man would give three brass
farthings, hanging against the wall of a pic-
turesque ruin than ships laden with merchan-
dise, or trains full of happy holiday people.
Here was a political economist indeed ! And
yet this singular individual had taken it upon
himself to correct Adam Smith — Adam Smith,
ladies and gentlemen — the father and founder
of the great science of political economy, and
John Stuart Mill, than whom, ladies and gentle-
men, a more acute intellect has never risen
among the sons of men. And, not only that,

MR. JOHN RUSK IN. 41

but he has dared to laugh at our trusted leader
— the man of the ages — the man whose name
will be written in history beside that of the
Caesars and the Napoleons, the Ciceros and the
Pitts. Ladies and gentlemen, you will scarcely
believe it, but the person of whom I speak has
likened that great man to a pair of bagpipes
with steam drones (cries of "Shame ! "). It is not
only an insult to our trusted leader, but also to
every member of the House of Commons, that
first assembly of gentlemen in the world, to
which I am proud to belong. I tell Mr. Ruskin
to-night, that the world may get on without pic-
tures, as it will get on without cranks, but it
can never — I repeat never — get along without
political economy, and the man who says other-
wise speaks in crass and unpardonable ignor-
ance.' And so the distinguished member of the
first assembly of gentlemen in the world com-
placently exposed your fallacies as a political
economist, as the American artist had exposed
your fallacies as an Art critic.

Nor was I yet done with these shocks. A
little later, while in conversation with .a man of
the world, who had the reputation of being

42 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

sharp and shrewd, and of having a good head
on his shoulders, I happened to mention your
name. ' Ah, Ruskin,' said my friend ; ' yes —
not bad in some ways ; gives fancy descriptions
of scenery and old buildings, and pictures, and
all that — but rather impracticable.'

These were three opinions of you which came
upon me, one after another, so rapidly as to
take away my breath, metaphorically speaking ;
and, though I emphatically dissent from them,
I much fear they give on the whole a too
accurate indication of the sentiments of your
countrymen regarding you. The blindest can
see that you are at variance with your age.
Much of what you regard with love and rever-
ence, your fellow-men regard with cold in-
difference, too often, indeed, with open and
insolent scorn. Much of what they praise and
cherish, you denounce with vehement indigna-
tion. Mere material prosperity, the seeking
after sensual pleasure, vulgar and extravagant
display — nearly everything, in short, in which
this era delights you do not commend nor sym-
pathise with, while the moral beauty which is
holiness, the self-sacrifice, all that goes to make

MR. JOHN RUSKIN. 43

the hero in the old sense of that word which
you admire, your contemporaries mostly laugh
at. Pursy Britannia goes her own way, pursu-
ing her own pleasures, content so long as she is
pursy, leaving you like one preaching in the
wilderness, or to an audience that has stopped
its ears. After all your exertions people still
prefer ices at Florian's and music by moonlight
on the Grand Canal, and paper lamps and the
English magazines at M. Onagaria's, to the
lessons of St. Mark's or the Ducal Palace.
Better days may come, but that is the temper
now. With the fate of Venice staring us in the
face, with the stern admonitions which you draw
from the ruins of her greatness and her gran-
deur, we still pursue selfish and ignoble plea-
sure while we have the means ; we close our
ears and harden our hearts and tell our souls
to eat, drink, and be merry, because our barns
are full and our presses bursting with new wine.
And, as we gaze on the crumbling walls of
Venice, heedless of any moral, so we think on
the punishment of Tyre as a just retribution for
her sins, unmindful that we, who inherit the
greatness of both, if we forget their example,

44 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

' may be led through prouder eminence to less
pitied destruction.' If ever we awake to the
lesson which the history of those old powers
teaches, the credit, I think, will be mainly due
to you.

In this century and England of ours, two men
have risen pre-eminent above all others in their
stern faith to themselves and duty — men who
refused, with a heroism worthy of the primitive,
epochs of the world, to truckle to expediency
or barter their talents in the market-place for
silver and gold, and these only. One was
Thomas Carlyle, the other is yourself. In an
age which is too often flippant, ribald, and scoff-
ing, an age in which the cynic and the sceptic
reign alternately, as the humour is to doubt or
to sneer, an age that thinks of the Deity as a
serviceable subject, affording opportunity for
sallies of wit or graceful decorations of the fancy
—in such an age you two have planted your-
selves on the Bible, and proclaimed to men,
without fear or favour, that they must live or
perish according as they regard its teachings.
One can imagine each of you starting forth on
his career with that grand old prayer of Milton's —

MR. JOHN R US KIN. 45

4 And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou knowest ; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant ; what in me is dark
Illumine ; what is low raise and support ;
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.'

Not a little singular it is to find so much of
the ruling spirit of Puritanism reappearing two
centuries after it was supposed to be completely
dead and done with. There is no chance for
Puritanism, as it existed in the days of Crom-
well and Milton, to get itself re-established
in our midst. England, we are told, would not
tolerate it, because it is too narrow, too bigoted,
too much addicted to psalm-singing, too old-
fashioned. We want spaciousness of creed in
these liberal days. We cannot bear restraint,
for it would diminish our enjoyment ; nor anti-
quated notions of eternal punishment, for they
would imply that we were not progressive ; so
we cut ourselves loose from the past and take
up doctrines that are at once easy and elegant.
When one remembers what Puritanism once did

46 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

for England at a critical time, and through Eng-
land for the world, one is almost inclined to
regret the vogue of that 'breadth' which can
so easily dispense with conviction and make
eternal life dependent on aesthetic tastes and
the ability to frame a syllogism. Faith has
been replaced by intellect. Man's reason,
which De Quincey called the most contempt
ible of all his faculties, has asserted itself, and
the finite has mastered the infinite. There
is no longer any mystery. Life and death are
scientifically accounted for, and explained ; and
man may take his ease amid his cushions and
his tawdry upholstery. In life the victualler,
the tailor, and the cabinetmaker are the grand
essentials ; in death, the fashionable undertaker
will not fail to do his duty : he will provide a fit
coffin and a respectable number of mourning-
coaches, and the exit is decently accomplished.
Puritanism was made of sterner stuff than this,
and so were Carlyle and you its latest, and, alas !
its most hopeless apostles.

I have bracketed you with Carlyle because
you and he are associated in the popular mind,
because your aims are essentially the same, and

MR. JOHN RUSK1N. 47

because you have called yourself his disciple.
But I do not mean to imply that you resemble
each other in mental constitution, that you are
of equal power, or have an equal chance of
literary immortality. Indeed, I think that you
cannot be properly compared, except in your
unswerving fidelity to all that is good and true,
and your hatred of all that is base and false.
You are a great writer, but you are not quite a
Carlyle. He had all your gifts, and more. But
perhaps I shall make myself clearer if I glance
very briefly at you separately.

Carlyle is no less distinguished by his imagi-
native force, than by his moral fervour. If
elements of power will make writings live, his
must long exist. Much, of course, depends on
the utility or inutility of a writer's doctrines, and
Carlyle's are not fashionable just now. But
there is that in his works which makes them
independent of doctrine and will preserve them
as literature. His philosophy may, or may not,
be the philosophy of the future ; it is to be
feared, indeed, that unless the world changes
radically he will appeal as a teacher only to a
few ; but his force cannot die, and his literary

48 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

influence will always be great, even should his
moral influence be nil. A dull man may be a
moral reformer, but Carlyle was a man of intui-
tion, a poet — in short, a man of genius. As
Emerson said of Goethe, he sees at every pore.
He is always more interesting than his subject,
and sheds light upon all he approaches, not
merely the light of purely intellectual faculties,
but the light of imagination. As you have
yourself said, only imagination can make writ-
ings live. The taste may be as elegant as that
of Chesterfield, the style as fine as that of Con-
greve; there may be wit, there may even be
humour, but if there be not imagination the
principle of life is wanting, and speedy death
and oblivion may be looked for. No learning,
no brilliancy, no analytical power will make up
for the want of imagination. Carlyle has a most
powerful and vivid imagination — if not creative,
at least associative and penetrative. He has
other qualities of greatness besides — unrivalled
humour, the most tender pathos, the most
scathing sarcasm. No historian has ever dared
to mingle humour, pathos, and tragedy as he
has mingled them. And he is equally great,

MR. JOHN RUSK IN. 49

whether depicting men or things. As a portrait-
painter he is unsurpassed by any writer save
Shakespeare alone. Consider how well you
know his characters : — Mirabeau, Danton,
Robespierre, Voltaire, Frederick the Great,
Cromwell, Jeffrey, Cagliostro, Dr. Francia. He
cannot touch on a character in the most casual
way, without lighting it up. View him how
you will, Carlyle is a Titan.

Now, while saying frankly that I consider you
a man of genius, I should not be disposed to
call you a Titan. As an interpreter of the sym-
bolic meaning of what is best in Art you are
unmatched. In that respect you are superior
to Carlyle, who knew little of Art, as represented
by pictures, and seemed not to value it at all.
In his Life of John Sterling, and elsewhere, he
speaks slightingly of it, calls it a windy doctrine,
and insinuates that it is quite unworthy of the
attention of any serious man. You have shown
that, if rightly considered, it may well be studied
by the best of men. This is your great merit.
You have shown that pictures are not merely
for the idler and the dilettante, but for earnest,
serious men and women, who have sufficient
D

So LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

love and sympathy to perceive their hidden
meanings. And, then, as a descriptive writer
you occupy a quite unique position. No other
writer has ever described the face of Nature
with such elaboration as you, nor transferred
to his pages so much of her warmth and colour-
ing. There are parts of Modern Painters that
cannot be described save by the epithet { gor-
geous.' Nor is this gorgeousness attained by
the exclusion of the mean and the common.
Milton found Paradise enchanting, but you go
to our meadows, among the grazing kine, and
preach your sermon from a blade of grass ; and
it is only the truth to say that a field of pasture
becomes as interesting as the bower of Eve.

It should not be forgotten, however, that, as
you have yourself said, minds of the very highest
order do not take much to descriptions of
scenery; or, having taken to them, speedily
abandon them. Your work is scenic from. first
to last. You have given us no portraits worth
naming beside Carlyle's. It may be you have
never seriously tried portrait-painting. But it
is doubtful whether you could have succeeded,
even if you had made the endeavour ; for you

, MR. JOHN R US KIN. 51

seem to lack that sympathetic insight which
marks the master of character. Perhaps it
would be fatal to the moral teacher to be too
widely sympathetic, yet Carlyle had as wide a
sympathy with men as Shakespeare himself.
You have not this sympathy, and therefore
cannot exhibit it in a gallery of portraits.

Much is made of style in these days, and a
writer's manner is often more looked to than
his matter. Whatever may be said of you in
other respects, no one will deny your unrivalled
superiority as a stylist. Let me give one example
of it. It is one which seems to have pleased
yourself, and, therefore, may be quoted with
fairness. I think I could give a more brilliant
example, but I am glad to take what has the
stamp of your own approval. It describes
Venice : —

1 A city of marble did I say ? nay, rather a
golden city, paved with emeralds. For, truly,
every pinnacle and turret glanced or glowed,
overlaid with gold or bossed with jasper. Be-
neath, the unsullied sea drew in deep breathing
to and fro its eddies of green waves. Deep-
hearted, majestic, terrible as the sea — the men

52 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

of Venice moved in sway of power and war ;
pure as her pillars of alabaster stood her mothers
and maidens ; from foot to brow, all noble,
walked her knights ; the low bronzed gleaming
of sea-rusted armour shot angrily under her
blood-red mantle folds. Fearless, faithful,
patient, impenetrable, implacable — every word
a fate, sate her Senate. In hope and honour,
lulled by flowing of wave around their isles of
sacred sand, each with his name written and the
cross graced at his side, lay her dead. A won-
derful piece of world. Rather, itself a world.
It lay along the face of the waters, no larger, as
its captains saw it from their masts at evening,
than a bar of sunset that could not pass away ;
but for its power, it must have seemed to them
as if they were sailing in the expanse of heaven,
and this a great planet, whose orient edge
widened through ether. A world from which
all ignoble care and petty thoughts were
banished, with all the common and poor ele-
ments of life. No foulness, nor tumult, in those
tremulous streets, that filled or fell beneath the
moon ; but rippled music of majestic change,
or thrilling silence. No weak walls could rise

MR. JOHN RUSKIN. 53

above them ; no low-roofed cottage, nor straw-
built shed. Only the strength as of rock, and
the finished setting as of stones most precious.
And around them, as far as the eye could reach,
still the soft moving of stainless waters, proudly
pure ; as not the flower, so neither the thorn
nor the thistle could grow in the glancing fields.
Ethereal strength of Alps, dream-like, vanish in
high procession beyond the Torcellan shore;
blue islands of Paduan hills, poised in the
golden west. Above, free winds and fiery
clouds, raging at their will : brightness out of
the north, and balm from the south, and the
star of the evening and morning, clear in the
limitless light of arched heaven and circling
sea.'

As a gem of English, I do not think that
could easily be beaten, even in the present era
of stylists.

To MR. JAMES RUSSELL
LOWELL.

SIR, — When the critics find time hanging
heavy on their hands, it is their handsome and
pleasant fashion to fall foul of the age in which
they live ; and this, it seems, is one of irredeem-
able mediocrity. According to our literary
censors we have no great poems, no great plays,
no great novels, no great histories, no great
biographies — nothing great in fact except, per-
haps, our pretensions, which, though vast
enough in all conscience, are of little present
value, and are certain to be quite worthless as
drafts on posterity. It is a doleful and depress-
ing view of the situation, and, I am inclined
to think, a false and, therefore, an unfair one.
As a creed, even when fallen back on only at
odd times, pessimism is always bad — bad
morally, aesthetically, financially; nor does it
mend matters that its dismal and depreciatory

54

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

MR . JA MRS R USSELL L O WELL. 5 5

croakings have so often an aspect of truth.
Some one has aptly and truthfully observed
that it disenchants and ungifts us ; and what-
ever does that had better be avoided ; so that
as a question of policy a cheerful self-con-
fidence, a buoyant self-esteem, a tendency to
exaggeration on the score of our own merits,
despite the danger there may be from vanity,
are, on the whole, healthy and hopeful signs.
To say the truth, only the hopeless faultfinder
would seriously deny that this age, though the
butt of so much pleasant ridicule, the theme for
so much ingenious depreciation, is as respect-
ably equipped in the matter of literary talent as
most of the ages that have gone before it.
To be sure it is neither Augustan nor Eliza-
bethan; but it might be shown that we
have still some tolerable writers in both
prose and verse ; some writers whose works
will outlast this generation; and more than
one whose writings, if I have any critical
judgment, will go to permanently adorn and
enrich that treasury of English literature which,
after all our conquests and gains, remains the
grandest possession of the Anglo-Saxon race.

56 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Nothing is more amusing than man's constant
readiness to abuse the age in which he lives
and extol the ages that are past. We all know
— at any rate all of us who are gifted with
imagination, that the past is, in all respects,
unmatchably glorious. A golden haze over-
hangs it, different altogether from the crude,
cold, grey atmosphere of the present. The
apples of the past were all grown in the garden
of the Hesperides ; they had a richer coat and
a more delicious flavour than the common bald-
wins and russets of to-day. The poetry of the
past was all indited in delectable grottoes and
fragrant bovvers and arbours and on the daisied
banks of limpid and purling brooks ; and it is
only fair to assume that the printers' ink was
tinted with gold and mixed with rosewater.
The romance of the past was real romance, not
simulated like ours. There were dryads, and
naiads, and shepherdesses in the past, while the
present possesses only matrons, young ladies,
and old maids. To be sure, men complained
in the past. But we wisely take no notice of
that, well knowing their querulousness was
caused by a superfluity of the delectable things

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 57

of life. Men complain, now, with reason. As
the poet says —

' Here is Hades, manifest, beholden
Surely, surely here, if aught be sure/

Yet, though we cannot compete with the past,
that does not seem a sufficient reason for
abusing the present.

Seriously in a literary way, at least, the
present age has no reason to be ashamed of
itself. If it has no Shakespeares, nor Miltons,
it has, at least, its Drydens and its Popes. The
Era that produces 'The Ring and the Book,'
' In Memoriam,' ' Snowbound,' and ' The Vision
of Sir Launfal,' may hold up its head beside
even the classic age of Queen Anne, an age
which, in my estimation, has received rather
more than its due meed of praise. Instead of
bemoaning our condition, as if only cowards
and dotards were generated nowadays, it is
better to believe with yourself that

' Here 'mid the bleak waves of our life and care,

Float the green fortunate Isles
Where all the hero-spirits dwell and share
Our martyrdoms and toils ;

The present moves attended
With all of brave and excellent and fair
That made the old time splendid. '

58 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

However, it is not now my business to render
justice to the ages, but to set down, with what
brevity and clearness I may, my opinions of the
creator of ' Hosea Biglow.' I mention Hosea
especially, because it is to him rather than to
your more ambitious or more serious works
that you owe your vogue.

Of the Bigloiv Papers, then, which first
gained you recognition, and by which you are
still known to the majority, I find Mr. Thomas
Hughes writing as follows : ' For real unmis-
takable genius — for that glorious fulness of
power which knocks a man down at a blow for
sheer admiration, and then makes him rush
into the arms of the knocker-down, and swear
eternal friendship with him for sheer delight,
the Biglow Papers stand alone.' The Biglow
Papers do certainly stand alone, at all events
they do not so closely resemble any other pro-
duction as to give the idea of imitation. Mr.
Hughes finds that if you resemble any of the
satirists it is Jean Paul Richter. With that
verdict, however, I cannot concur. Glimpses
and suggestions of Jean Paul you may give (a
man of your extensive reading could hardly

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 59

help picking up ideas from other minds), but it
seems to me that as a satirist you are much
more strongly under Scottish than German
influence. I think that if you had a model at
all in your satire it was Burns. Indeed, my
impression is that the original idea of the
Biglow Papers^ at any rate so far as their form
is concerned, came to you through reading the
works of the Scottish ploughman. Burns is a
standing example of what genius can do with
dialect. He was the first writer of real power
to adopt, in all its fulness and simplicity, the
common speech of the peasantry, which in his
hands is graceful and fluent, and for potency
unrivalled. It may be that his example set
you to work in the vein which has yielded so
much rich ore. Nor in such cases is it any
discredit to be a borrower. So long as the
borrower makes good use of what he takes he
is fairly within his rights in borrowing. Skake-
speare is the greatest writer, and the greatest
borrower of whom the world has any know-
ledge. . And could we wish that he had bor-
rowed less ? Surely not. He takes things in
such a princely way, and makes such splendid

60 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

use of them, that we would fain see him take
more. And if you have taken a hint from
Burns, you certainly have made such use of it
as only genius can. The Biglow Papers, not-
withstanding their smack of Burns, are really
unique. One of your critics finds their charac-
teristics to be ' the most exuberant and ex-
travagant humour, coupled with strong, noble,
Christian purpose — a thorough scorn for all
that is false and base, all the more withering
because of the thorough geniality of the writer
. . . every word tells, every laugh is a blow;
as if the good Momus had turned out as Mars,
and were hard at work fighting every inch of
him, grinning his broadest all the while.' It is
hard to say whether the wit, the humour, the
satire, the philosophy, or the Christianity of the
Biglow Papers is the more admirable. Cer-
tainly they are all there at their best ; all work-
ing, and working successfully in the cause of
humanity. But I prefer to consider the work
as a contribution to literature, rather than as an
effort in philanthropy. The cause you advo-
cated has been won, after such a struggle as the
world never before witnessed; but your writ-

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 61

ings remain, and, I think, will long remain as a
piece of literature.

In the first blush of pleasure on reading any-
thing so fresh and racy, so humorous and so
caustic, so popular and yet so profound, as the
Biglow Papers, one is apt to exaggerate merits.
Yet it would be hard to employ epithets regard-
ing the best parts of that work which could not
be justified on the strictest critical grounds.
The final test of all true merit is intellect.
When you say that there is intellect in any
work, you give it almost the highest possible
praise. The Biglow Papers show the stamp of
an acute and capacious mind. One reads with
the deepening impression that, had you cared,
you could have done anything else equally well.
' 1 have no idea of a great man,' says Carlyle,
in his emphatic way, ' who could not be any-
thing he pleased.' And assuredly it is no
flattery to say that you give one the impression
of that power and adaptability which the sage
of Chelsea had in his mind's-eye. Hosea Big-
low and Bird o' Fredum Sawin would be
excellent politicians — minus their consciences ;
and the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., is a

62 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

very sound philosopher, in his old-fashioned
way.

It is the fate of all eminent humorists to have
their one gift prized at the expense of all other
gifts they may possess. Your humour is so
abounding that it diverts the attention from
your other qualities. Every one is conscious of
your power to raise a laugh, but not every one,
in their glee at being so well entertained, what
there is in addition to the humour.. For in-
stance, in that keen and cutting satire, ' The
Pious Editor's Creed,' most readers find more
amusement than food for reflection ; yet there
is a deeper intent than to amuse. There is a
terrible grimness, a terrible earnestness behind
the laughter. It is rather Hercules with his
club than Momus with his grin that the clarified
vision will behold. I am not sure that since
' Holy Willie's Prayer ' was written we have
had anything more severe than that ' Pious
Editor's Creed.' Were it not for its humour,
it is enough to make American editors squirm
in their chairs for ever.

Almost equally severe are your pictures of
the avaricious, time-serving politician, the man

MR. JA MRS R USSELL L 0 WELL . 63

without patriotism, without morality, without a
single worthy motive, a single ambition above
place and the emoluments and perquisites per-
taining to it— the man who, whatever trouble
his country may be in, is always found * frontin'
north by south.' Then, in the broader phases
of humour, hardly anything could be more
mirth-provoking than such pieces as ' What Mr.
Robinson Thinks,' and ' The Epistles of Bird o'
Fredum Sawin.' In Mr. Sawin there is a jovial
spirit, which even prison walls and broken ribs,
and loss of arms and legs, cannot damp. When
he loses a lower limb, he is not without conso-
lation in his loss : —

' There 's one good thing though to be said about my

wooden new one.
The liquor can't get into it ez't used to in the true

one ;
So it saves drink,'

which is certainly a consideration to one whose
thirst is perennial and whose dollars are limited.
And in jail his jocularity is still unabated. He
apologises for his gross unpunctuality as a cor-
respondent by stating that he is —

64 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

' Where sech things ez paper 'n ink air clean agin the

rules,
A kind o' vicy varsy house built dreffle strong and

stout,
So'st honest people can't git in, nor t'other sort git

out.
An' with the winders so contrived, you 'd prob'ly like

the view
Better a-lookin' in than out, though it seems singular,

tu;
But then the landlord sets by ye, can't bear ye out o'

sight,
And locks ye up ez reg'lar as an outside door at night.'

And no one will deny that correspondence is
difficult, and apt to be irregular under such
circumstances. But Mr. Sawin has a heart
and spirit above all the ills of fate, and can
laugh whatever betide.

In some parts of the Biglow Papers the
humour is so audacious that some good and
worthy people have thought it verged on irreve-
rence. For example, where Hosea insists on
personal responsibility for killing one's fellow-
creatures : —

c If you take a sword an' dror it,

An' go stick a feller thru,
Guv'ment ain't to answer for it,
God '11 send the bill to you.'

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 65
And again, where he says : —

' Ye '11 hev' to git up airly
If ye want to take in God. '

Certain Christian people, I say, mistaking
your motive in writing such lines, have taken
exception to the familiar use of the name of the
Deity. But it is only a plain statement of a
great and weighty truth ; and your own expla-
nation is ample when you state ' that one of the
things I am proud of in my countrymen is that
they do not put their Maker away far from them,
or interpret the fear of God into being afraid of
Him . . . and when people stand in great
dread of an invisible power, I suspect they mis-
take quite another personage for the Deity.'
Those who brought the charge of profanity had
not understood the spirit in which you wrote,
nor the lesson you wished to inculcate. But
there are always pious people to retard reforms
and misapprehend the intentions of authors.

I have dwelt long on the Biglow Papers, yet

I cannot quit them without noting one or two

of the pregnant sayings of the Rev. Homer

Wilbur. In the superabundance of humour

E

66 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

and satire, Mr. Wilbur and his trenchant truths
are apt to be forgotten. That ' Table Talk ' of
his, short as it is, is excellent, as good in its
way as the table talk of Samuel Johnson. The
following are, I think, worthy of being stored in
the memory : — ' There is no impiety so abject
as that which expects to be dead-headed through
life, and which, calling itself Trust in Provi-
dence, is in reality asking Providence to trust
us, and take up all our goods on false pre-
tences.' ' Unless one's thoughts pack more
neatly in verse than in prose, it is wiser to
refrain. Commonplace gains nothing by being
translated into rhyme, for it is something which
no hocus-pocus can transubstantiate with the
real presence of living thought.' ' Beware of
simulated feeling, it is hypocrisy's first cousin.'
' There seem, nowadays, to be two sources of
literary inspiration — fulness of mind and empti-
ness of pocket.' 'Attention is the stuff that
memory is made of, and memory is accumulated
genius.' ' Do not look for the Millennium as
imminent. One generation is apt to get all the
wear it can out of the old clothes of the last,
and is always sure to use up every paling of the

MR. JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 67

old fence that will hold a nail in building the
new.'

Your serious poems — the poems by which, I
dare say, you would wish to be remembered —
still remain to be noticed. They are not all of
equal merit, and perhaps none is quite Miltonic.
But they are one and all true poems — that is,
they are not prose and commonplace, perked,
cramped, and squeezed into rhyme. They are
not a mere rhetorical jingle, like so much which
at present passes current for poetry. They are
instinct with fire, and they are full of imagina-
tion. It would be a great pleasure to me did
space permit, which it doesn't, to dilate on their
qualities. I think you are one of the most use-
ful and satisfying of modern poets. For the
growing mind wishing to imbibe right ideas of
men and things, I know not, among living
writers, your superior. Wherefore I should like
to dwell at length on the lessons you teach I
should like to look through that ' Fable for
Critics,' and that delightful ode, 'To a Dande-
lion,' and 'The Vision of Sir Launfal,' and
' Heart's-ease and Rue,' where your muse is in
her mellow Indian summer (long may it be ere

68 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

her winter come), and many other pieces ; but
I may not.

However, as I have indulged myself by tran-
scribing some specimens of your writing in a
comic and satirical vein, I cannot forbear to
quote one of your sonnets, which shows you in
a different light. It shows that the true poet,
the true man indeed, must, in spite of himself,
be sometimes serious. It is the sonnet ' To the
Spirit of Keats.'

' Great Soul, thou sittest with me in my room,
Uplifting me with thy vast quiet eyes,
On whose full orbs with kindly lustre lies

The twilight warmth of ruddy ember-gloom j

Thy clear, strong tones will oft bring sudden bloom
Of hope secure to him who lonely cries,
Wrestling with the young poet's agonies,

Neglect and scorn, which seem a certain doom ;
Yes, the few words which, like great thunder-drops,

Thy large heart down to earth shoots doubtfully ;
Thrilled by the inward lightning of its might,
Serene and pure like gushing joy of light,

Shall track the eternal chords of destiny
After the moon-led pulse of ocean stops.'

Of your prose works it is hardly necessary to
speak, for I believe they are even better known
than your poetry. They display that humour

MR. JA MES R USSELL L 0 WELL . 69

and insight which distinguish your poems.
Moreover, they reveal a scholarship for which
your poems would hardly prepare one. As a
critic, perhaps, your chief characteristic is
sanity. Your essays on Dryden, Chaucer,
Dante, and Keats, are masterpieces. That on
Carlyle is not so satisfactory ; but in his case
there is some excuse, for the grim old man had
irritated you by his attitude on American ques-
tions during the Civil War. There is an asperity,
too, in the paper ' On a Certain Condescension
in Foreigners,' which is unusual with you. But
here, again, you had, as your countrymen say,
been rubbed ' agin the fur.'

To COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH
TOLSTOI.

MONSIEUR LE COMTE, — When the late
Matthew Arnold wrote that ' the Russian novel
has now the vogue and deserves to have it : if
fresh literary productions maintain this vogue
and enhance it we shall all be learning Russian,'
he was for once in his life clearly and emphati-
cally giving voice to the popular sentiment. It
is really not improbable that we shall presently
be learning your language in order to study
your works ; for we are a peculiar people, and
think no labour too great that is undertaken in
honour of a favourite. Nay, if you are reason-
able, and do not expect too much of us, it may
be that in a lackadaisical way even your rather
singular doctrines may become fashionable
amongst us. Of late years you have dealt a
good deal in theology, and theology is gener-
ally supposed to be dry reading ; but you must

70

I-KO TOLSTOI.

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEV1CH TOLSTOI. 71

not suppose, M. le Comte, that we dislike
theology. On the contrary, we delight, we
revel, in it. For instance, no novel is so popular
with us as the theological novel. Ladies cour-
ageously write this class of fiction, and other
ladies quite cheerfully take it to their boudoirs,
and puzzle their fair heads over its recondite
passages in preference to going to study the
fashions at the opera ; statesmen turn aside
from affairs of state to write articles on it ; clergy-
men take it into the pulpit with them and
preach sermons on it to enraptured audiences ;
merchants discuss it after 'change ; lawyers, oddly
enough, grow casuistical over it — in a word, it
is immensely popular. There is little danger
therefore of our being offended with the theo-
logical foibles of any favourite writer. Only, as
I have already hinted, you must not expect us
to follow you too far. The line must be drawn
when our material interests are touched. As
you are perhaps aware, we are a practical people,
and you must see yourself how extremely incon-
venient it would be to put your charming
theories into practice. We shall be quite con-
tent to discuss them, and watch how they sue-

72 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

ceed experimentally in autocratic Russia. When
there has been a general distribution of property
in that free and enlightened country we will
give the matter graver consideration here. It
is fit that reform, like charity, should begin at
home.

As a writer you were lucky in making your
appearance at a most opportune moment. ' A
pigmy 's a giant,' says our Mr. Meredith, ' if he
can manage to arrive in season ' ; and though
you are far from being a pigmy, there is an
obvious advantage even to you in arriving at a
time when there was a general search for novelty.
When you were discovered (an author never
makes himself known, but is always discovered)
our appetites were sorely cloyed; we were
languid and sick, inexpressibly bored with the
endless imitations of the grotesque horseplay
and free-weeping of Dickens, the ugly cynicism
of Thackeray, and the heavy tragedy of George
Eliot. We needed an alterative, and no altera-
tive was to be had. We turned our longing
faces to the great West and were disappointed.
Mr. Henry James, though extremely neat and
precise and well-bred, is a trifle chilly. Mr.

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 73

Howells is too much afraid of the big passions,
and Mr. Bret Harte is repeating himself un-
conscionably. To France we scarcely durst
look lest our characters might suffer. M. Zola
is really a shocking man, and M. Daudet is
hardly so circumspect as he might be (at any
rate so we were told), and, being piously credu-
lous in such matters, we sighed and passed on.
Germany, Italy, and Spain we found almost
barren, and we were just on the point of aban-
doning the weary search, when lo ! we saw three
amorphous figures looming on the steppes of
Russia. We hurried thither, and immediately
there was a sensation. We pounced on Tur-
gueneff, then on Dostoieffsky ; and now we are
struggling with yourself— surveying you on all
sides, taking your dimension, and giving you an
occasional crack and thump to see whether or
no you sound hollow. The majority of us have
not yet quite made up our minds regarding you.
Nor need this be a surprise, for to the uncritical
you are a most tantalising phenomenon. You
bear no trace of familiar influence. You belong
to neither the romantic nor the naturalistic
school as established in our midst. You are

74 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

not a bowwowist nor a 'dismal conceited
analyst.' Your philosophy is not the philo-
sophy of Robert Elsmere, nor of Professor
Huxley, nor of M. Renan. There is no evi-
dence that you know anything at all of the
sharp divisions set up between our several
schools of fiction. What is the stolid Briton,
as fond of his prejudices as of his roast-beef, to
make of you? Obviously he can only stare
and ejaculate, and turn you over, thinking what
manner of man you can be, and praying you
may not turn out a monster. That is the atti-
tude towards you of the average British reader.
But, as already stated, there are others even
in Britain who recognise in you those qualities
which constitute a bond of brotherhood be-
tween men of all ages and of all climes. You
are no partisan, you belong to no clique or
coterie— you could not if you would ; for as a
man, by taking thought, cannot add one inch
to his stature, neither can a really great soul
narrow himself so as to become the creature of a
sect. You have the breadth and the courage of
greatness. In your fidelity to nature you some-
times remind one of Shakespeare and some-

COUNT LYOF N1KOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 75

times of Scott and sometimes of Cervantes and
sometimes of Balzac. Their work may not
always be pleasant, but it is always true, and
therefore always great. They are as unflinching
as Nature herself, and will not be turned aside
for fear of giving offence to the goody-goody —
that saccharine compound of inanities and inep-
titudes which is at present threatening to take
all the savour out of life. You, like the great
ones I have named, deal with vice and crime,
with fierce and sinful passions, with a fine im-
partiality quite unexampled in a time when so
many of our writers are tremulously pious and
mealy-mouthed, and so many more are vaunt-
fully immoral. You do not go in search of the
base and the ugly, like some of the prurient
writers of France and their imitators in America,
nor do you absolutely shun them, like some of
our Sunday-school authors in England, who
will not so much as mention the devil except
by some polite and veiling appellative. Wicked-
ness stands in your way, and you touch on
it, as every writer must who is not a moral
coward ; but you never make sin engaging, and
you never fail to note its consequences. As

76 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Matthew Arnold well said, you do not pay
homage to the Goddess Lubricity.

As a novelist you are generally classed among
the realists. Arbitrary classification is perhaps
necessary in criticism, but it is misleading.
When realism is mentioned in England we
instantly think of M. Zola and yourself; and
though I am far from holding the conventional
British opinion of the inexorable author of
L'Assommoir, I believe the association does
you a clear injustice. You have just as little
and as much in common with M. Zola as with
Walter Scott and Victor Hugo. As a matter
of fact you are one of the writers (too few alas !)
who cannot be satisfactorily classed. If we
take War and Peace, for instance, it is diffi-
cult to decide whether romance or realism pre-
dominates. Both are there in the highest and
best sense. The realism is as faithful as the
best of Jane Austen, the romance as fine as the
best of Nathaniel Hawthorne ; and in combina-
tion they produce a result which is perhaps
unparalleled in the later literature of the world.
War and Peace is an unmatchable book, a book
which demonstrates the foolishness of critical

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 77

canons, and the futility of arbitrary classifica-
tions.

In such sketches as ' the death of Ivan
Ilyitch,' you are purely and simply, I had
almost said atrociously, realistic. I know no
piece of writing of equal length so exquisitely
gruesome as that sombre study of the insidious
progress of disease, and the blighting of a great
ambition. It is a study so absorbing that when
you begin to read you cannot stop till the end
is reached, and so painful, indeed so hideous,
that you seem to move in an atmosphere of
disease and death long after closing the book.
There, M. le Comte, you give unadulterated
realism, and there is no difficulty as to class,
but in your larger works you are quite as much
the poet as the analyst ; and it is unsafe and
unsatisfactory to relegate you to any particular
category. The most comprehensive label will
give but a dim and confused idea of your genius
and qualities.

And, indeed, why should we give ourselves
unnecessary trouble, and do you a gratuitous
injustice by affixing any label ? Is it not given
to intelligent men in this nineteenth century to

78 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

enjoy and admire without being scientifically
concerned regarding that which yields them
pleasure? Would it not be feasible, for instance,
to say that War and Peace, or Anna Karenin, is
a great work without being painfully or mislead-
ingly argumentative in support of the statement ?
Is it absolutely necessary to say this part is
idyllic, this realistic, that again soundly philo-
sophic, that well reasoned, that analytic, that
romantic ? Must we dissect afresh, and pass a
cultured judgment on every character we en-
counter ? Must we, with laboured and pedantic
phraseology, go into the good and bad qualities
of Pierre Besuskof, of Andrew Bolkonsky, of
Helen, of Natacha Rostow, of Kiva, of Ivan
Ilyitch, of Zhilin, of Prince Basil ? Must we
take the gigantic canvas of War and Peace to
bits and examine each under the microscope ?
It surely is not necessary at this time of day.
At any rate, for myself, I would make the
simple confession that I think War and Peace
and Anna Karenin two of the few really
great novels of the world ? — say two of the first
dozen ; or shall we stretch a point and say two
of the first score ? That they easily place you

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 79

among the giants is, I think, beyond all ques-
tion. You take your place in that illustrious
front rank with Walter Scott and Goethe and
Hugo and Balzac and Cervantes and George
Sand, an immortal while still in the flesh.

But it is a significant indication of our national
tastes, and the bent of our national genius, that
it is not as a novelist you interest us most.
Pre-eminent as you are in the art of writing
fiction, it is rather as a theologian and moral
philosopher that you occupy our attention. We
read with avidity, and discuss with solemnity,
those very remarkable works of yours setting
forth your religious beliefs, and your views on
certain portions of Scripture. I have already
said that theology interests us most profoundly;
and it is only stating a simple fact to say that
many who do not know your novels, or care
little for them, are deeply moved by your
religious writings. Perhaps it is because they
have rather more freshness and originality than
is usual in theological works. It may not, in-
deed, seem a very original thing to aspire to
follow the teachings of Jesus. For close on
twenty centuries the whole Christian world has

8o LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

been persuading itself that its conduct has,
in the main, conformed to the commands of
Christ. Wherein then do your doctrines diifer
from those of the rest of mankind ? In deny-
ing that there was anything figurative in the
sermons and other addresses — public and
private — of Jesus. Christians — even the most
devout and sincere — have been wont to cross
great difficulties and chasms by the easy bridge
of figurativeness. It would be quite impos-
sible to literally obey such and such a com-
mand, they say. Jesus did not mean us to
perform impossibilities, therefore that parti-
cular part must be figurative. You answer
'No; it is not figurative — nothing that Christ
ever spoke was figurative. Every utterance of
his was as direct and precise as language could
make it. Jesus meant you to obey his commands
literally. If you choose to make a plain injunc-
tion figurative you do so at your peril. Jesus
meant all he said.' And to make the matter
clearer you formulated your belief in five com-
mandments.

i st. — 'Live in peace with all men — treat no
one as contemptible and beneath you. Not

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOI. 81

only allow yourself no anger, but do not rest
until you dissipate even unreasonable anger in
others against yourself.'

2d. — ' No libertinage and no divorce : let
every man have one wife and every woman one
husband.'

3d. — ' Never on any pretext take an oath of
service of any kind ; all such oaths are imposed
for a bad purpose.'

4th. — ' Never employ force against the evil-
doer ; bear whatever wrong is done you without
opposing the wrongdoer or seeking to have him
punished.'

5th. — 'Renounce all distinction of nationality;
do not admit that men of another nation may
ever be treated by you as enemies; love all
men alike as alike near to you ; do good to all
alike.'

It must be admitted that you support your
interpretation of the Gospels with very con-
siderable force of logic, and that in the
course of your inquiries you shed light on
many obscure passages of Scripture. You go
to the fountain-head, and are hardly civil to
Biblical Commentators. You find them all
F

82 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

blinded by tradition, you say, not one of them
to be relied on ; and then you write this terrible
sentence — ' I firmly believe that, a few centuries
hence, the history of what we call the scientific
activity of this age will be a prolific subject for
hilarity and pity.' Ah ! M. le Comte, how
unkind of you, considering the vast number of
religious and theological writers who have used
their talents and their learning in leading us
easily over thorny places ! You are indeed a
disturbing phenomenon ; we were at peace, and
you would not let us alone ; we were pleased to
exercise the imagination regarding the doctrine
of Jesus, and you say that imagination must be
rigidly excluded.

And then think, M. le Comte, what you bid
us do. * Our entire social fabric,' you say, ' is
founded upon principles that Jesus reproved.'
Has our civilisation been indeed then a failure,
and are we to make a fresh start ? Are we to
dismiss the constable, the magistrate, and the
executioner ? Are we to open the prison doors
and let the whole corrupt mass of humanity
that seethes within flow out and invade our
homes ? Is the thief to be allowed to put forth

COUNT LYOF NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOL 83

his hand and steal with impunity? Is the
murderer to take life, and the libertine to
debauch virtue without let or hindrance ? Are
we to divide our property with the idle and
profligate, and toil for those who oppress us ?
Is the Church to give up her tithes, and must
rulers forego their well-earned rewards? Is
there to be no distinction between man and
man, except in power to benefit others? Are
we, in a word, to undo all that civilisation —
that great progressive cumulative force which
has been the theme of such frequent laudation
from the ablest and best of the sons of men —
are we to undo all that it has done ? And you
answer, yes, — most emphatically, yes; and as
your authority give, 'The Sermon on the
Mount.' But was the Sermon on the Mount
ever preached? Mr. Huxley doubts it; and
he doubts also whether 'the so-called Lord's
Prayer was ever prayed by Jesus of Nazareth.'
What then, M. le Comte, if your doctrine of
Jesus is not the doctrine of Jesus at all, but
something attributed to him by fable ? In that
case, would not your whole theological super-
structure collapse ? But whatever may be your

84 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

fate as a theologian, I think that as an artist
there can be but one opinion concerning you
— namely, that you are 'a great soul and a
great writer,' and that your place in universal
literature is secure.

I AMI-IS ANTHONY I-ROUDH.

To MR. JAMES ANTHONY
FROUDE.

SIR, — You are known in the five-fold char-
acter of historian, biographer, novelist, essayist,
and writer of travels. That you should have
attempted so much proves that you are a man
of more than ordinary courage ; that you have
acquitted yourself so well in each of these
widely dissimilar roles shows that you are a man
of more than ordinary capacity. It is not, per-
haps, within the scope of human talent to be at
once various and supreme in excellence. The
Admirable Crichtons of whom we occasionally
hear are, I suspect, rather fables than facts,
stimulating creations of the imagination, and no
more to be treated as verities than Don Quixote,
or Baron Munchausen, or the Count of Monte
Cristo. At any rate one never meets them in real
life. And, indeed, though versatility is a good
thing, it is not without its disadvantages. Its

85

86 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

achievements are specious rather than solid, and
rarely add to the world's stock of knowledge, or
enhance the world's comfort. One admires the
easy adaptability of Proteus, and the handiness
of Briareus in carrying on many occupations
simultaneously, but Hercules with only two
stout arms and an unchangeable shape did
more meritorious service than either. Folks
like that vicar of whom Praed sings that —

' His talk is like a stream which runs,

With rapid change, from rocks to roses ;
It slips from politics to puns,

It glides from Mahomet to Moses ;
Beginning with the laws that keep

The planets in their radiant courses,
And ending with some precept deep

For skinning eels or shoeing horses ' —

though highly interesting and brilliant indi-
viduals, are in the main only a species of human
fire rockets that may for a little dazzle, but can
hardly benefit mankind. It remains mostly
true what the philosophic Mr. Pope long ago
asserted, that —

' One science only will one genius fit,
So wide is art, so narrow human wit. '

Or as the German Shakespeare has it: 'We

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 87

should guard against a talent which we cannot
hope to practise in perfection. Improve it as
we may, we shall always, in the end, when the
merit of the master has become apparent to us,
painfully lament the loss of time and strength
devoted to "such botching.'

Now while it would be most unjust to aver
that you have ever botched anything you have
attempted, it is no more than the truth to say
that in hardly any work you have accomplished
have you shown yourself an impeccable artist.
Some critics, indeed, have fallen foul of your
entire series of works, and condemned them in
one sweeping sentence. Those astute persons
inform us that, as an historian, you are so full of
inveterate prepossessions, that your presenta-
tions of men and things have little value,
that as a biographer you are careless, and as a
writer of travels almost unprecedentedly inac-
curate. On the latter point, indeed, they claim
living witnesses. The Australians and New
Zealanders, for instance, are said to repudiate
your descriptions of themselves and their coun-
tries, to aver that you rarely took the trouble to
observe things for yourself, and that when you

88 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

tried you were not successful. 'And how,'
demand your critics triumphantly, 'are we to
depend on the historical statements of a man
who cannot describe what he has seen with his
own eyes?' The question is pertinent, for it
seems no more than reasonable to doubt the
reliability of the historian who cannot tell us
the exact aspect of things he has himself looked
upon. Into the question whether you are right
or wrong regarding the Antipodes, however, I
will not now enter ; for I have seen so little of
the land of the kangaroo myself that it would
ill become me to question the correctness of
your observations concerning it ; only it might
be remarked that if you are right respect-
ing it, most other travellers, from the late
Anthony Trollope, and Mr. George Augustus
Sala, and Mr. Archibald Forbes, and Dr. Dale
down, are wrong. But your historical and
biographical work is another matter, and on
that I may be allowed an opinion like the rest
of your critics.

Macaulay, in one of his most brilliant essays,
informs us that ' History, at least, in its state of
ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 89

philosophy. It impresses general truths on the
mind by a vivid representation of particular
characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two
hostile elements of which it consists have never
been known to form a perfect amalgamation ;
and at length, in our time, they have been com-
pletely and professedly separated. Good his-
tories in the proper sense of the word we have
not. But we have good historical romances
and good historical essays. The imagination
and the reason, if we may use a legal metaphor,
have made partition of a province of literature
of which they were formerly seized, per my et
per tout-, and now they hold their respective
portions in severalty, instead of holding the
whole in common. To make the past present,
to bring the distant near, to place us in the
society of a great man, or on the eminence
which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to
invest with the reality of human flesh and blood
beings whom we are too much inclined to con-
sider as personified qualities in an allegory, . . .
these parts of the duty which properly belongs
to the historian have been appropriated by the
historical novelist. On the other hand, to ex-

90 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

tract the philosophy of history, to direct our
judgment of events and men, to trace the con-
nection of causes and effects, and to draw from
the occurrences of former times general lessons
of moral and political wisdom, has become the
business of a distinct class of writers.'

Like M. Sismondi, you combine the two
functions — that is, you extract the philosophy
and direct the judgment, and you likewise
attempt to give that lively representation of
men, manners, and events which is the part of
the historical novelist. The combination, how-
ever, does not produce that state of ideal per-
fection referred to by the essayist. Neither as
a writer of history, in the ordinary sense of the
word, nor as a writer of fiction, do you stand in
the first rank. Your purely historical writings
do not, in my estimation, place you among the
great historians of our country, nor your fiction
among its great novelists. As an historian you
have not the reach of Gibbon, nor the brilliancy
of Macaulay, nor the exactness of Robertson,
nor the acumen and concinnity of Hume, nor
the force, the vividness, the lurid picturesque-
ness of Carlyle ; as a novelist you have not the

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 91

humour of Cervantes nor the imagination of
Scott. But, while saying this, I think that both
your scientific studies in history, and your fiction,
are distinctly good, notwithstanding all that has
been said to the contrary by critics of weight
and discernment. The. English in Ireland in
the Eighteenth Century is, to my mind, the very
best book on the subject which exists in the
English language ; and it should be remembered
to your credit that, as a British Tory, you had
special temptations to misrepresent our Irish
brethren. Those who wish to understand the
position of Ireland in the last century cannot
do better than read your three volumes. The
perusal of them would make clear much that
now seems inexplicable, and reasonable much
that now seems absurd to superficial observers
and politicians who are great in airing ignorance.
Nor in The Two Chiefs of Dunboy do I see
anything at all unworthy of you. It is not a
novel of the very highest order, as I have above
hinted, but it is far from being a bad one, or
deserving the hard names it has been called in
some quarters. One or two sapient critics
(conscious, I suppose, of their own superior

92 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

ability) have pronounced it dull, insipid, and
characterless, and one gentleman went so far as
to say it positively was not worth reading. I
believe some perspicacious person long ago dis-
covered that wholesale condemnation is a com-
paratively easy thing. It requires no genius to
cavil, and a very ordinary talent is equal to the
task of pointing out faults. And the worst of
it is that even in the best of works there are
always faults in plenty to point out. I dare say
it would be safe to aver that never in this world
has there appeared a work of creative imagina-
tion in which defects were not a good deal thicker
than plums in a pudding. The greenest critic
will show you more defects in a single play of
Shakespeare's — say in Othello — than your arith-
metic can well compute ; and, as to the imper-
fections of the works of lesser lights, the task of
merely enumerating them would be so pro-
digious and so fearful that the galleys or the
treadmill were genuine recreation in comparison.
To say, then, that there are blemishes in The
Two Chiefs of Dunboy, is but to say that it is
written by a man and not by an angel or other
being of infinite skill and capacity. But with

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 93

all its faults, I did not find it dull, nor insipid,
nor characterless.

It is true that it does not quite succeed in
giving that lively representation of men and
things of which Macaulay speaks, and which we
find at its best in the novels of Scott. Through-
out the book there is a lack of freedom ; the
imagination is for the most part too closely
under the control of reason, and only breaks
out here and there, as it were, by accident and
against your will : in other words, the scientific
historian is too much for the creative artist. As
Byron said of Campbell, you are afraid to launch
out into the deep, to come face to face with
the glory and the terror of the storms of emo-
tion ; so that instead of warm and magnificent
pictures we have much valuable information
about soil and crops, many judicial reflections
on political conspiracies, no end of subtle
deductions, and a superabundance of extract of
philosophy. I have said that you are a man of
courage, but in this book you appear as a very
timid adventurer, indeed. Courage is no less
essential in writing novels than in commanding
armies or levying, taxes, and the bolder you are

94 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

the more will be thought of you. Notice how
boldly Dumas spreads his wings and looks the
sun in the face; notice, too, the audacity of
Victor Hugo and Balzac, and, above all, the
free and independent movement of Scott. The
courage of Scott is sublime. ' Go,' he seems to
say to his imagination, ' and where you lead I
will follow.' And never once does he falter or
look back, never once does he feel dizzy, how-
ever high he may be soaring. If you compare
one of his historical novels — say Kcnilworth —
with The Two Chiefs of Dunboy, you will find
the latter superior in every technical detail and
inferior in most other qualities that go to the
making of a first-rate novel or romance — in
breadth, in freedom, in warmth of colouring, in
picturesqueness, in power of characterisation —
in short, in charm and interest. Moreover,
there is this difference (and it is one of more
consequence than may at first appear) between
such a book as Kenilworth and The Two Chiefs
of Dunboy, that while in the former the interest
radiates outward from the characters, in the
latter it goes inward from what may be called
the historical setting. And again Scott blends

MR. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 95

fact and fancy so cunningly that you cannot
distinguish the one from the other, while with
you the transition from reality to fiction is often
difficult and nearly always clearly perceptible.

But perhaps I am judging you by too high a
standard. Every man improves with practice —
the genius as well as the dolt, and it may be
that enlarged experience would give you con-
fidence enough to throw aside the scientific
crutch, and run with the best of them. If it
were the work of a young author I should say
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy is full of promise.
The story is occasionally of absorbing interest,
and several of the characters are well drawn.
Colonel Goring is as fine a fellow as one would
wish to meet, loyal and courageous every inch
of him, a man with a heart and a conscience
and leal to them both ; in a word, an Englishman
of the very best type — the Puritan type, which
has done more for England than all other types
combined. One regrets that so good a soldier
and so true a man should have fallen in a
miserable scuffle in a blacksmith's shop. Morty
Sullivan, likewise, is a character that dwells with
the reader. The infatuated patriot, burning to

96 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

free Ireland from the accursed Saxon yoke,
willing to sacrifice his life if so be that that will
win liberty for his country, is forcibly delineated.
He is the best character in the book, and one
of the best in recent fiction. Nor are the minor
characters ill-drawn. Sylvester O'Sullivan, Con-
nell, Blake, and Fitzherbert, all reveal themselves
in a manner more or less clear and definite.
Then as to incidents, the chase of the Doutelle
by the Government frigate ^Eolus is capitally
described ; so, also, is the duel between Morty
Sullivan and Colonel Goring. And, while
enumerating the good points of the book, I
must not omit to mention the limpid and
delightful flow of its English. Some hard
things have been said of British novelists on
the score of style, but he were a hypercritical
reader who would find fault with the style of
The Two Chiefs of Dunboy.

It is not, however, as a novelist, or historian,
or essayist, that you are best known, but as a
biographer. For every one who has read your
histories, or your essays, or your novel, ten have
read your Lift of Thomas Carlyle. It is safe to
say that no recent biographical work — no recent

MX. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 97

work, indeed, of any sort outside of fiction —
has been so widely read or so variously criticised
as that biography of the Sage of Chelsea.

Nor is the reason hard to understand. The
book is one of the most readable biographies
in the language, and the subject is popular, and
peculiar. It was to be expected that of such
an original and unconventional, such an unique
character as Carlyle, there would be extreme
and diverse opinions ; and hence there must
likewise be a diversity of view regarding the
manner in which his biographer performed his
task. It was not your fault that so considerable
a section of the reading public came to the
perusal of your work with inveterate prejudices
and manifold preconceptions. But it was a
grave misfortune, for it made it hard — nay, flatly
impossible, to give anything like general satis-
faction. Carlyle is a subject that could not be
made universally pleasing. In his lifetime he had
tramped, with no great show of politeness, on a
good many gouty toes, and the owners of the
gouty toes were, of course, savagely on the alert
to avenge their wrongs. Unhappily they had
but too many opportunities. Carlyle had not
G

98 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

the virtue — if virtue it be — of reticence. The
man who could publicly speak of the entire
population of our beloved and enlightened
England as so many millions— mostly fools —
was not likely to be polite in his private utter-
ances. And assuredly Carlyle was not. In
conversation as in writing, in diaries as in works
professedly public, he expressed his whole mind
on every subject which occupied his attention,
careless whom he might offend; adverse and
disagreeable opinions he expressed with the
emphasis of thunder-claps : and when it is
added that his criticisms of contemporaries
were nearly always fiercely hostile or cuttingly
contemptuous, we have a subject that the
highest genius, the genius of Shakespeare him-
self, could not portray at once truthfully and
pleasingly — at any rate to the majority. That
your portrait of the Sage is not, in many re-
spects, a flattering one, is at least as much
his fault as yours. Some of Carlyle's friends
have blamed you for quoting too freely from
his private papers. They seem to think that if
you had passed over in silence some of the ' ill-
natured criticisms ' of the great critic that the

MR. JAMES A NTH ON Y FR 0 UDE. 99

portrait would be much more agreeable. Doubt-
less ; but it would not be so near the truth. I
think that if Carlyle himself were to return to
criticise your work he would say that you have
quoted not too much but too little. I suppose
every biographer worthy of the name must in
some sort be a partisan, but he should yield as
little as possible to all temptations to suppress.
Your hero-worship has led you to suppress a
great deal of what Carlyle wrote, and to this
error of suppression nine-tenths of the blemishes
of the book are directly attributable. As it
stands the picture is more or less distorted, not,
as I believe, because you wished to give an
unfavourable presentation of your subject, but
because of a too great anxiety to conciliate
public opinion. Perfect independence is the
first essential in a biographer of Carlyle. I
believe that if every word ever written by
Carlyle were printed he would be found, what
indeed you often assure us he was, a man
of warm and wide affections, of generous dis-
position, and in the main of liberal judg-
ments. And even in your biography as it
now stands those who study it with open and

ioo LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

free minds will find him anything but male-
volent, anything but a backbiter, anything but
an ogre : though those who have suffered
under his lash are likely, despite all the efforts
of a biographer, to continue to regard him as a
monster.

To his great intellectual power you do ample
justice. In your book he stands forth not only
as the most striking personality but as the
greatest writer of later times.

THOMAS HARDY.

To MR. THOMAS HARDY.

SIR, — I think it would be safe to say that
you are the most distinctively modern of our
living novelists of note. Mr. Besant may oc-
casionally seem to deal more directly with the
perplexing problems of the day ; Mr. Meredith
may appear, to some, to be more emphatically
the intellectual child of the age ; but of certain
broad aspects which are as characteristically
nineteenth century as they are characteristically
English, you are, I think, beyond rivalry as a
delineator. The fashion now obtaining among
the better known of contemporary writers of
fiction is to travel back in search of the
romantic and the picturesque, as if these ele-
ments were entirely absent from latter-day life,
instead of being necessarily as perennial as
human nature itself, because they are part of it.
The best work of Mr. Blackmore and Mr.

Stevenson belongs almost exclusively to the

101

102 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

past; even Mr. Besant, notwithstanding his
watchful and sympathetic interest in the welfare
of the poor, and his sturdy endeavours to be
realistic, likes, at times, to disentangle himself
from the present, and return to what are gra-
tuitously taken to have been freer and more
spacious days. Perhaps there was really more
freedom in the world during the rule of dark-
ness than in this era of light ; though, if such
were the case, the people were singularly blind
to their advantages, and grievously given to
grumbling; for we do not read the autobio-
graphy of any foregoing generation that was
satisfied with itself. The habit is always to
exaggerate the good things of the past, and
depreciate the good things of the present. In
retrospection our imaginations are only too apt
to ' transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into am-
brosia.' ' Ah ! beautiful young eyes,' exclaims
the poet, ' brimming with love and hope, wholly
vanished now in that other world we call the
Past, or peering doubtfully through the pensive
gloaming of memory, your light impoverishes
these cheaper days.' So it ever is. So is it,
especially, with the novelist who desires to give

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 103

to his work something of that glamour of un-
reality, which is thought by some to be the
final touch of perfection in all things artistic.
A character seen in dim twilight, and supposed
to be sporting a wig, knee-breeches, and silver
buckles, with a sword, which usually proves
more a hindrance than a help, would seem to
be so much more impressive than one en-
countered in the prosaic glare of the sun, clad
in convenient, if commonplace, clothes, wearing
his natural hair, and unencumbered and unim-
peded by any weapon more unmanageable than
a penknife. So, I say, some novelists would
seem to think. But you are not of the number.
Your work, in texture and spirit, is distinctly of
to-day, an unmistakable product of the last
quarter of the nineteenth century.

But here I would guard against a false im-
plication. The school which is supposed to
represent the culture and taste of the day is
pre-eminently realistic ; or, perhaps, more cor-
rectly, tediously photographic. It gives the
warts and wrinkles, the angle of the hat and
the cut of the coat, the black eyes and the
abrasions, the bloated countenance, and the

104 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

leaky shoes, with great care and fidelity. Nor
does it generally fail, with a subtle and refined
art peculiar to itself, to give something of the
malodorous atmosphere in which its materials
mature. But the soul is let as severely alone
as if it did not exist. And in truth, for the
thorough-going realist, it does not exist. You
cannot handle, weigh, and measure it as you
would a pound of flesh. It has no solidity;
there is nothing tangible and carnal about it ;
it does not appeal to what some one has called
the practical senses, and so it is ignored. Now
you are realistic, but you are something more.
With an eye for the outward appearance of
things as unerring as that of Zola himself, you
are kept wholesome and high by that fine
idealism which is the distinguishing charac-
teristic of George Sand, and of which every
writer, who is not merely a reporter, must have
at least a little. Perhaps no living writer can
give more genuinely realistic touches than are
to be found in abundance in all your books.
In the first sentence of Far from the Madding
Crowd, to take an easy example, when we are
told that, ' When Farmer Oak smiled, the cor-

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 105

ners of his mouth spread till they were within
an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes
were reduced to mere chinks, and diverging
wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon
his countenance like the rays of a rudimentary
sketch of the rising sun,' we have a more lively
conception of Mr. Oak's facial characteristics
than most novelists could give by pages of de-
scription. On the other hand, the development
of the character is ideal throughout, and Far-
mer Oak does not turn out the clothes-horse, or
spiritual caricature, he would certainly prove in
the hands of the realists, whose rigid square-
and-rule method of treating life would at times
almost lead one to infer that there was no such
thing as destiny, and that passion had happily
been banished. The Greek conception of Fate
was much more pleasant, indeed, much more
rational, than the paltry modern doctrines about
'volition.' There is something in the Greek
theory which appeals irresistibly to primitive
man, if he only had the courage to confess it ;
the volitional doctrine is a mere feeder and
inflater of vanity, and could hardly become
popular on any other grounds. Your work has

io6 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

really much of the Greek spirit in it, and is,
therefore, unique in the present era. It is
realistic, yet distinguished from the productions
of the realistic school by a strong element of
romance; it is romantic, yet differs from the
writings of the school of pure romance, by an
intense and overwhelming reality. This is to
say much, because it implies a combination of
the best features of the two schools. I do not
think the statement that such a combination is
seen in your books would be either rash or
exaggerated. Your best work does seem to me
at once ideal and realistic in the best sense.
It deals with present-day life as if there were
something perennial in it — that is, that those
elements of romance which some profess an
nability to discover, save in the remote past,
are really as much present now as ever they
were — while it does not disdain those ap-
parently prosaic features which the romancists
so studiously ignore, but which are so essen-
tial to any picture of humanity that has any
approximation to completeness.

In my estimation, the great defect of our
latter-day fiction is the lack of catholicity and

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 107

breadth. Hard and fast lines are drawn be-
tween realism and romance, as if in their essence
they were irreconcilably opposed to each other,
instead of being mutually dependent. They
are both in life, and until the world and human
nature change, they are likely to remain in it.
Why, then, should they not go hand in hand in
books ? Yet we have two distinct sets of novel-
ists : one loudly declaring that romance is chaff,
and sedulously eschewing it; the other that
realism is mud, and cannot be touched without
contamination. Is it that our writers lack com-
prehensiveness ? that their vision is not large
and strong enough to take in the whole scope
of life, as the great ones of past generations
took it in ? I can hardly think so. I am of
opinion that perversity and slavish fear of in-
consistency are at the bottom of most of the
evils that affect the fiction of to-day. In this
versatile age authors write criticisms as well as
novels. It seems almost compulsory on them
to start with some inelastic theory of life; a
theory that cannot be altered or stretched to
embrace the new conditions of the new times.
And such a theory, once propounded, binds a

io8 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

critic hand and foot for life, unless he be a per-
son of quite phenomenal honesty and courage.
One cannot believe that many of the doctrines
one sees upheld by some worthy writers, with
so much ingenious sophistry, represent actual
beliefs. One can imagine a writer saying to
himself something like this : ' I have said so
and so on such and such an occasion. I think
differently now, but I am committed ; there is
my past deliverance, and honour is honour. I
must be true to myself, I must stick to my
word; at all hazards I must be consistent; what
I said once I must say now, and to the end of
the chapter — heigh-ho.' To be consistent in
the eyes of the world, a man must practise in
his old age what he has preached in his youth,
and at moments when, perhaps, he was not
quite sober or responsible. In most cases ser-
vile consistency is only dastardly cowardice.
Only a few choice souls in each generation
have the courage to be nobly inconsistent ;
and, paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely
this inconsistency that we are in such pressing
need of to-day. One is often forced to turn
one's back on a friend ; why should not a man

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 109

turn his back on himself when he is conscious
of error ? We find Scott perpetually disregard-
ing his own dicta ; we find Byron doing the
same; and it is more than probable that had
Shakespeare condescended to give us a sys-
tematised theory of life he would have been at
variance with himself, ignoring creatively the law
he had asserted critically.

You are fortunate in never having hampered
yourself with theories. You have laid down no
hard and fast rules for yourself, saying ' thus and
thus will I do, and thus and thus will I not do.'
You take what you want without fear of offend-
ing any pet prejudice, or falsifying any blatant
oracle, and the consequence is that you draw
life as it really exists, with all its sad realism and
its fascinating romance. There are some things
in The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, to
take one instance out of many, so realistic, that
even the culture of Boston has signified its ap-
proval of them ; yet the atmosphere of the book
is essentially romantic. Henchard is a roman-
tic character — in some parts his career is pre-
eminently romantic ; but we follow him through
realities which might be paralleled and verified

I io LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

in a hundred towns like Casterbridge, on any
day of the week. One thing only disturbs the
harmony and general congruity of the book. I
refer to Henchard's sale of his wife. That in-
cident, I confess, seems to me to verge rather
too closely on the improbable, if not on the
farcical or absurd. It would almost appear
as if at the outset you had mistaken the scope
and quality of your material, and intended the
book to be something different from what it is—
something half whimsical, perhaps, — and that
you only recognised your opportunity when you
were well on with your story. The conduct of
Henchard's wife, too, is rather — I was going to
write disappointing, but surprising would be the
better word. I suppose there are women who
would tramp round the country, if not quite
willingly, at least quite meekly, to be offered for
sale at every public-house that is passed, and
who would go off quietly with casual sailors as
their new lords and masters, but it has never
been my fortune to come into contact with them.
Considering the frailty and natural curiosity of
man, it is, on the whole, just as well that such
doves are rare, for one might be tempted to in-

MR. THOMAS HARDY. in

vest — hence domestic complications, and public
expense through the necessity of increasing the
judicial force in the Divorce Court. But, while
taking exception to the sale of the wife, it must
be admitted that, in the midst of the incongruity,
there is a reality that reminds one of Henry
Fielding, or, perhaps more forcibly, of Jonathan
Swift, and almost convinces one that it is right
and proper for men to dispose of wives who
prove an encumbrance, and altogether natural
that wives should be obedient and submissive
in such transactions. In Gulliver, once get
over the absurdity of the Flying Island, and all
seems as natural as need be ; in like manner,
when one is past the sale of the wife in The
Mayor of Casterbridge there is nothing in it to
disturb credulity. In other respects the book
is, like all your books, masterly. Michael Hen-
chard is a splendid character — one of the best
you have ever drawn. Even in his degradation
he is noble. He is a creature of impulses,
but of generous impulses, so that often when
he is doing that for which the law would
punish him, the reader's sympathies are
entirely with him. Had he been less mag-

H2 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

nanimous one feels that he would have been
more successful (not as an artistic creation, but
as a man of business), but the interest would
not then be half so keen. His treatment of
Donald Farfrae is almost heroic. Not the loss
of his business, not the blasting of his dearest
ambitions, not insults and aggravations could
make Henchard anything else than generous.
Even when he and Farfrae have quarrelled out-
right, and have met to dispose of each other for
ever, Henchard's better nature does not sink
out of sight.

In the fight between the two men, for instance,
Henchard begins with the intention of killing
Farfrae — and he could have done it, there is no
doubt about that — and he ends by handing him
his life and reproaching himself for his disgrace-
ful behaviour.

Farfrae is hardly so good a creation. He is
more conventional, more bookish, the result of
reading rather than observation and inspiration.
You do not know the Scotsman as well as you
know the rural Englishman. Even Donald's
speeches are rather strange to one who knows
much of the country and people lying beyond

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 113

the Tweed. One might, for instance, inquire
what Presbyterian cream is, and how it could
be as warreming to the stomach as Casterbridge
ale ? and a summer jarreny to Edinboro', would,
doubtless, be a very pleasant novelty. But even
Farfrae is conceivable and companionable.

Indeed, I think it would be quite impossible
for you to touch a character, however lightly,
without imparting to it something of the vitality
which genius alone can give. Let there be no
mincing of words. It may be a heresy, after
all that has been said and written, to. assert that
such a thing as genius exists at all, and that you
are as great a master of character as any novelist
whom this country has produced, scarcely ex-
cepting even Scott, or Fielding, or Thackeray —
it may be a heresy, I say, to state as much ; but
then one must be heretical occasionally, in order
to be truthful. All your books that I have ever
read are 'masterly in minute characterisation
and delicious in humour.' I have spoken at
some length of Henchard, and called him one
of your best creations, but he is not, by a long
way, your only good one. Gabriel Oak, and a
score or two others, might be named in the
H

114 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

same sentence. And for general excellence it
seems to me that you are almost, if not quite,
unmatched among contemporary novelists.
Such a book as The Woodlanders is enough to
make one feel proud of one's generation, and,
while it is always hard to predict what will live
and what will not, I think it might surely be
prophesied that that book will be known long
after your generation. So, also, one would be
inclined to say, will Far from the Madding
Crowd, though not without a touch of melo-
drama here and there that is hardly in your best
style; while, if fidelity and idealism count for
anything, Under the Greenwood Tree is as sure
of life as anything that has been done in our
day.

I understand you are no favourite with the
young lady who patronises the circulating lib-
raries. She is in the habit of making mar-
ginal notes in your books which are sometimes
more entertaining than complimentary. Precisely
why the fair one quarrels with you is, of course,
among the mysteries of the world, but it is
vaguely understood she considers herself slan-
dered in your female characters, so she calls

MR. THOMAS HARDY. 115

you * that horrid man Hardy,' a description
which I suppose, to the feminine mind, expresses
the height of disgust. What would she have ?
Mr. Lang, in upholding Thackeray in the face
of detraction on the score of his female charac-
ters, says that people should really find fault
with nature, and not with the novelist who copies
nature. You might make a similar reply to
your feminine critics. So long as Bathshebas
are tolerably common in life, why should they
not have their portraits painted ? Your women
are not conventional. They are not of the
flaccid, pink and white type ; but neither, so
far as I can remember, are they inherently
wicked. Let us have living creations — that is
the great want in fiction — and that you give us
in your women as well as in your men. Let us
be thankful.

For power in describing scenery and natural
objects generally, I hardly know your superior
among novelists since Scott. Nay, I think that,
in some respects, you are above the master
himself. If he had the freer hand, you have,
perhaps, the truer. Everywhere you are just as
poetic as he, and generally far more minute —

n6 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

without being in the least tedious. There are
as choice bits of description in your books as
are to be met with in all fiction — I had almost
said in all literature. In reading you, one often
witnesses a whole world bursting into bloom ;
we feel the fragrance in our nostrils, and all but
see the circulation of the sap in those woods
you so much delight to describe. We have
writers who are more fastidious about having
nature always in holiday attire, but none who
paints her more truthfully or feelingly as she
is ordinarily, nor is there anything in the least
sentimental in your love of nature. Rousseau
has not infected you with his weakness, and
you have not copied the lackadaisical whin-
ings of so many of his disciples. In a word, in
describing nature, as in all else you do, you are
strong, and not only strong, but delightful.

1 1 6 LE TTEKS TO LI VING A UTHORS.

without being in the least tedious. There are
as choice bits of description in your books as
are to be met with in all fiction — I had almost
said in all literature. In reading you, one often
witnesses a whole world bursting into bloom ;
we feel the fragrance in our nostrils, and all but
see the circulation of the sap in those woods
you so much delight to describe. We have
writers who are more fastidious about having
nature always in holiday attire, but none who
paints her more truthfully or feelingly as she
is ordinarily, nor is there anything in the least
sentimental in your love of nature. Rousseau
has not infected you with his weakness, and
you have not copied the lackadaisical whin-
ings of so many of his disciples. In a word, in
describing nature, as in all else you do, you are
strong, and not only strong, but delightful.

1 1 6 LE TTERS TO LI VING A UTHORS,

without being in the least tedious. There are
as choice bits of description in your books as
are to be met with in all fiction — I had almost
said in all literature. In reading you, one often
witnesses a whole world bursting into bloom ;
we feel the fragrance in our nostrils, and all but
see the circulation of the sap in those woods
you so much delight to describe. We have
writers who are more fastidious about having
nature always in holiday attire, but none who
paints her more truthfully or feelingly as she
is ordinarily, nor is there anything in the least
sentimental in your love of nature. Rousseau
has not infected you with his weakness, and
you have not copied the lackadaisical whin-
ings of so many of his disciples. In a word, in
describing nature, as in all else you do, you are
strong, and not only strong, but delightful.

JOHN GREENLEAF WIIITTIl-K.

To MR. JOHN GREENLEAF
WHITTIER.

SIR, — In many respects yours has been an
ideal life. By this I do not mean that you
have enjoyed immunity from the cares and
crosses, the heart-break and the strife, that, in
the main, are the portion of mankind ; that you
have passed your days in a bower of roses, trill-
ing daintily like a species of mocking-bird, as
the humour seized you, or in a library jingling
euphonious rhymes designed for the delectation
of the sensuous ear. Quite the contrary. Nor
do you altogether realise to one's imagination
that majestic picture of Milton's of a ' poet soar-
ing in the high regions of his fancy, with his
garland and singing robes about him.' You
have, indeed, soared in the high regions of
fancy, else had you never earned the honour-
able title of poet ; but for garland you have had
the smoke of battle on your brow, and your

117

n8 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

singing robe has been a common jacket. Your
life has not been one of Sybaritic ease and
ample leisure, but of hot and arduous conflict.
Nevertheless I repeat that in many respects it has
been an ideal one, for your efforts have mightily
hastened a glorious march from darkness into
light, from mephitic pestilential swamps, suffo-
cating in their noisomeness, to breezy, healthy
heights, where the soul of manhood can expand
and breathe as becomes it. In the pride of
your young strength you girded the sword on
the thigh, and went fearlessly forth to fight the
powers of tyranny and oppression, with hardly
any support, save that sublime conviction which
has so often won the day in unequal struggles
— the conviction that, ultimately, wrong must
perish and right must triumph. The battle
was fierce and obstinate, for the enemy was
strong, and long was the issue dubious, but in
the darkest hour you never faltered. With a
faith as unflinching as that of our own brave
Cromwell, you, and the noble ones banded with
you, held on, growing ever the more determined
the heavier the odds against you. When Church
and State opposed you, when Cabinet Ministers

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 119

denounced you as revolutionary and anarchic,
and ministers of religion strove to prove from
the Bible that the white man had a vested right
to traffic in human flesh, you defiantly and
scornfully asked regarding the free citizen—

1 Must he be told his freedom stands

On slavery's dark foundations strong—
On breaking hearts and fettered hands,

On robbery and crime and wrong ?
That all his fathers taught is vain —
That freedom's emblem is the chain?'

Then the moneyed opposition, stung into
defiant rage, after prophesying failure, asked
what were you that you should presume to dis-
turb the economy of nature ; that you should
dictate to your superiors, the holders of human
property, whose rights were perhaps equal to
those of the Deity Himself? You were un-
known, you were obscure, you were without
influence, all of which was true ; but you were
not without zeal, and so you fought on, never
despairing, till at last the head of the hydra was
crushed, and in view of the concourse of evil
prophets, many of them, I regret to say, hailing
from our own free isle, you sheathed the sword

120 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

and put on the victor's crown. It was a glori-
ous triumph ; and now in the serenity of old
age, with the consciousness of duty well done,
you are reaping your reward in a fame as wide
as the civilised world, and the lasting affection
of all lovers of liberty. It is a sweet and peace-
ful evening after a stormy day. You could not
yourself have desired a serener or a more vic-
torious close to the battle. Those who were
once most virulent in their abuse, and most con-
fident in their predictions of failure, are now
amongst your most enthusiastic eulogists. No
voice now dares to defend the monstrous wrong
at which you hurled your thunders more than
a generation ago. Slavery has been stamped
out of existence among the Anglo-Saxon race,
and on the bright roll of the vanquishers there
is no name that will prove more enduring than
that of John Greenleaf Whittier.

Edmund Burke said, in passing a panegyric
on Fox for so valiantly espousing the cause of
the people of India, that ' it was not only in
the Roman customs, but it is in the nature and
constitution of things that calumny and abuse
are essential parts of triumph.' For you the

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 121

calumny and abuse are past, buried with the
hatred which gave them birth, and only the
splendid victory and the memory of your own
heroic conduct remain. Burke and Fox, and
those associated with them in their high endeav-
our, did not succeed in all their noble aims
regarding the people of India. They did not,
nobly as they struggled, even ' secure to every
man the rice in his pot ' ; but you and those who
worked with you made a free man of every
slave within the bounds and dominions of the
United States.

I am well aware that in the popular mind
you are not much associated with those reforms
in the laws of your country which made so
many millions of bondmen free. We talk of
William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips,
and Abraham Lincoln, but we too often forget
the claims of J. G. Whittier. Not that you would,
yourself put forward any claims or feel disap-
pointed at being passed over in commemora-
tion odes and orations ; but if, as the old pro-
verb holds, justice is a jewel, then each should
have his right reward. We honour the names
and memories of Garrison, Phillips, and Lincoln.

122 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Garrison was undoubtedly the protagonist in
the great drama. The young man in the little
back office, in the little back street of Boston,
who wrote and printed his obscure sheet him-
self, deserves the highest encomiums that tongue
or pen can pass on him. He was the first to
inaugurate a systematic campaign against slavery,
and was, moreover, I believe, the means of en-
listing your sympathies and services in the cause
of emancipation ; so that in connection with
the abolition movement his claims to honour
are paramount. Nor will the powerful aid of
Wendell Phillips — the silvery-tongued, as his
compatriots loved to call him — the greatest
orator of the century, as he has been styled by
so good a judge as your friend, the late John
Bright, — his aid, I say, will not readily be for-
gotten by the friends of freedom. And surely
the world will long cherish a kindly feeling for
the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Old Abe —
the homely, the genial, the shrewd, the fore-
seeing, the great, who was equally at home
whether entertaining the loafers about a country
grocery store with yarns, or directing the affairs
of a State ; the provincial attorney who piloted

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 123

a nation through the most gigantic conflict that
ever taxed the manhood and energy of a people,
the 'new birth of our new soil, our first
American,' as Mr. Lowell has described him.
Surely the world will never forget him. For
hardly in modern times has such a ruler, so
sagacious, so far-seeing, so patient, so courage-
ous, so hopeful, and so helpful, either risen from
the ranks of the people or stepped from the
purple.

But his work, and the work of the others I
have named, being purely political, is easily seen
and easily appraised, whereas the value of your
work is hard to reckon. When poetry is an
element in the work of reformation, it is almost
certain to remain unappreciated. The poet
works silently and mysteriously in the deep
places of the soul, and so ignorant and careless
are people that the impulse which he gives is
often ascribed to somebody or something else.
Poetry is vaguely acknowledged to have an
ennobling influence, but it is not thought to
have much potency as a political factor. Yet,
Mr. Lowell claims for it ' an influence more
durable and more widely operative than that

124 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

exerted by any other form in which human
genius has found expression.' And beyond
question he is right. The influence of poetry
in any cause it espouses is absolutely incalcul-
able. When Fletcher of Saltoun said, ' Give
me the making of a nation's songs, and I care
not who makes its laws,' he was not overrating
the power of poetry, as might very easily be
proved. It has been said that the poems of
Homer did more than aught else to unite the
Grecian States. We see the influence of song
in the struggles of Scotland and Ireland. Ritson
assures us that the poetic squibs of the Cavaliers,
during the Commonwealth, kept alive the spirit
of loyalty, and ultimately contributed to the
Restoration ; and so I might go on giving end-
less instances of the power of song over a
people's hearts and minds. But why multiply
examples with your own case before us ? It is
a fact which scarcely requires assertion, that
your poetry proved a mighty help to those who
were labouring to free the African in America.
You, perhaps, more than any other, with the
single exception of Garrison, prepared the way
for that act of manumission which has made the

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 125

memory of Abraham Lincoln as lasting as the
human race itself.

A poet, however, cannot be an active and
conscious reformer with impunity. Much of
your poetry having been written for a specific
purpose, to serve a passing, if pressing, need,
has already lost much of its value as literature.
A recent and sympathetic critic has well said,
' Mr. Whittier can afford to own that he has
sometimes failed to rise above the level of the
verse maker. A writer who celebrates the
events of the passing hour must expect the
lustre of some performances to fade with the
interests which called them forth, and in the
mass of Mr. Whittier's productions, representing
as it does the fruitage of a long and busy life,
there is much, undoubtedly, of an ephemeral
character ; but there is an abundance of durable
work of a peculiar and rare quality, and there
are certain themes which, by right of discovery,
this writer has made his own.' Yes, there is
much that is durable after the patriotic and
indignant outbursts of verse have been excised ;
much that might make that strong address of
Mr. Swinburne's as appropriate to you as to

126 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

your compatriot and brother poet, Walt Whit-
man : —

* O strong-winged soul with prophetic

Lips, hot with the blood-beats of song,
With tremor of heart-strings magnetic,
With thoughts as thunders in throng,
With consonant ardours of chords
That pierce men's souls as with swords,
And hale them hearing along ! '

If you could not in comparison to the mighty
ones of the realm of song be called great, if

' Not yours the song whose thunderous chime

Eternal echoes render ;
The mournful Tuscan's haunted rhyme,
And Milton's starry splendour,'

it is certainly a song which sweetens toil. Of
you it might be said what you have yourself so
feelingly sung of Burns—

' Through all his tuneful art how strong

The human feeling gushes !
The very moonlight of his song
Is warm with smiles and blushes.'

But though you invite comparison with Burns,
I do not mean to imply that you are his equal
in poetic power. You have lyric force, but you
have not his lyric force. You have insight, but
not his insight ; you have tenderness and passion,

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 127

but they are not his tenderness and passion.
Of his powers of caricature and satire you have
very little, and of his humour less. Burns has
sung the loves and lives of men and women as
they never were sung before his time, as they
have not been sung since, and as, in all pro-
bability, they never will be sung again. Your
work then has not the high poetic qualities of
Burns's, and that to be sure is no disparage-
ment to you, seeing that Burns is out and away
the greatest poet we have had since the days of
Milton. But you resemble him in many ways,
and follow at a distance where he leads. Like
him you sing of humble things ; like him you
take for your text that

' Rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that,'

only your sermon, as compared with his, is
pitched in a minor key.

Nor in another line which is fashionable just
now, and for which you have shown a fondness,
do you compare quite favourably with some of
the older writers — I mean the ballad. Charming
and pathetic ballads you have indeed given us,
as any one who has read ' Mary Garvin ' and

128 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

1 Maud Muller ' knows, — ballads that are among
the best of their class produced in the present
century. But this century hardly excels in
ballad writing. Nothing that you have done,
nothing that any of your fellow-poets of recent
times have done, will stand comparison, say
with 'The Twa Corbies' or 'Fair Helen of
Kirkconnell.' What a vista these simple words
open to the imagination ! —

' There were three rauens sat on a tre,
They were as blacke as they might be ;
The one of them said to his mate,
" Where shall we our breakfast take ? "
" Downe in yonder greene field
There lies a knight slain under his shield." '

No more is wanted ; the imagination fills up
all the rest, and one sees the ghastly banquet
spread with a vividness that is positively painful.
And what modern verse so well expresses agony
of soul as these fearful and tragic lines : —

' Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropped
And died to succour me ! '

There is the force of incipient madness there,
the heart-strings are cracking, the whole being

MR. JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 129

is thrilled with the ecstasy of despair, and the
grim spectre is waiting for his prey in the back-
ground. We cannot produce such effects now
by the use of written words, probably because
we have lost our simplicity and cannot feel with
sufficient intensity. Perhaps those old ballads
are after all too intense ; perhaps their lightning-
like brevity strikes home too quickly to be alto-
gether comfortable. We like to take our plea-
sures quietly — at any rate such pleasures as we
derive from reading poetry : and the man who
stirs us too strongly is quite as likely to get a
reprimand as a nod of thanks or a smile of
encouragement. Your ballads, and indeed all
your poems, give satisfaction without rousing to
any painful pitch of excitement. And they are
as pure and fresh and wholesome as the breezes
blowing among the pines of your own Bay State,
or the springs gushing from its hillsides. If
your poetry cannot in strictness be called great,
it is at least genuine, and that is no slight
thing at a time when verbal flippancies and
oddities of form are so often the care of our
poets. You are a true child of nature — un-
spoiled by any affectation. What you write
I

130 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

comes from the heart and goes to the heart.
You are no mere jingler of rhyme ; there is an
earnest aim in all your work ; and it has merit
enough, I believe, to hand your name down to
future generations.

But I should imagine that you are compara-
tively careless of fame. After all, there is but
one thing that can give solid comfort in the
sunset hour of life, and that is the conscious-
ness of having used one's talents in the highest
service to which it was possible to put them.
That consciousness is surely yours. You have
done what you could for your fellow-men ; you
have fought the battle of the weak, and helped
to raise the down-trodden and the oppressed.
There is a glory higher than the laurel of the
poet : the glory of good deeds done in behalf of
suffering humanity ; and it is yours. You are
a poet, a true and sweet one, and something
better.

'ALGERNON CHARLES SWINKURN!-:.

To MR. ALGERNON CHARLES
SWINBURNE.

SIR, — It is strictly within the limits of truth
to say that you are one of the hardest literary
enigmas of the age. To guess what your guid-
ing principle in public is — supposing such a
thing to be among your personal possessions —
would require not merely human ingenuity and
penetration, but something of that high gift of
clairvoyance or second-sight which is thought
to be the peculiar attribute of witches and
beings of a superhuman order of intelligence.
In the public — and the public surely includes
the literary — conduct of most men and women,
there is some leading principle, by the aid of
which one may arrive at some sort of judgment
concerning the motive of their lives. In yours
there should seem to be nothing of the kind.
Your career, so far as I have ever been able to

131

132 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

discover, is safely above the charge of congruity,
consistency, or unity. It is your forte to be for
ever disappointing. If one seize on what
appears to be a trait, in the fond imagination
that at last he has found a clew which will guide
him in the labyrinth of conflicting evidence, he
is apt to find it negatived at some important
turn, and come back on his hands like a dis-
honoured cheque. Nor are what in the writings
of others would be accepted as pledges to be
depended on. Fronti nulla fides. You have
the most daring, the most fascinating, the
most tantalising way of contradicting yourself.
You are consistent only in your inconsistency.
You would appear to treat each separate thought
and opinion, to which you give utterance, as if
they had no connection with past thoughts and
opinions, and were to have no connection with
those which were to come. Alike as a poet, a
politician, and a critic, you have ' gone back on
yourself/ as the Americans say, regardless, con-
temptuously regardless, of uniformity and the
opinion of the world. What you said yester-
day, with the solemnity and assurance of an
oracle, is flatly contradicted by what you say to-

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 133

day ; and it may, without misgiving, be assumed
that what you say to-day will be contradicted
by the judgment on men and things it may
please you to pass to-morrow. You are heroic-
ally true to yourself in this, that no past utter-
ance of yours can be relied on as giving the
faintest indication of your future utterances.

This, be it frankly admitted, implies no
ordinary degree of courage. The fear of in-
consistency is, on the authority of the old adage,
the fear of fools. And to be sure we all live to
learn. It is beyond all question better to dis-
card the opinions of the past, if we discover
them to be wrong, than to stick to them at the
expense of truth, and for the mere sake of
making a creditable appearance in the eyes of
men. But there are two sorts of inconsistency :
that which springs from deep sincerity, and that
which springs from sheer capriciousness. In
other words, there is the inconsistency of ad-
vancing reason and intelligence, and the incon-
sistency of perverse humours. I am not going
to say, nor to imply, which of the two is yours.
I might make a guess and be wrong, in which
case I should be doing you an injustice. Like

134 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

a certain astute politician, of whom you have
doubtless read —

' I don't make no insinooations ;
I jest let on I smell a rat.'

Old-fashioned science taught us that our
substance changed once in every seven years ;
new-fashioned science, by one of its brightest
apostles, Dr. Holmes, tells us that, instead of
undergoing a change every seven years, our
bodies really change with every breath we draw.
Perhaps it is with the mental as with the mate-
rial part of us ; so that it may be every minute
witnesses several complete changes in the con-
stitution of the mind. Bailey, indeed, says
distinctly that ' man's mind is like the moon,'
and the moon, we know, is subject to change.
And your own case might be instanced as an
argument in favour of the theory. I am not
jesting, but going strictly and seriously on the
evidence furnished by your own published
works. If we are to attach any importance to
an author's dogmatic expression of opinion, you
certainly are addicted to change. You began
your career as a red-hot Republican ; to-day
you are a Tory of the Tories, as rank and

MR, ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 135

haughty, and scornful as the best, or worst, of
those whose special function in life it is to
trample on the liberties of the people. In the
ardour of your youth, and the first full force
of your manhood, you sympathised nobly and
eloquently with every aspiration for freedom,
wherever such was to be detected. You were
with Poland and Hungary in their struggles to
throw off the yoke of a grinding and alien
power ; you were with France in her efforts to
bring the tenure of Courts to a close. No
living author has wasted so much frenzied
rhetoric in espousing the cause of the masses
against the classes. Yet, that there might be
nothing wanting in the incongruity and incon-
sistency of your public appearance, no sooner
does there come an appeal to your own door
than you hasten with more than aristocratic
rigour and haughtiness to stop the ear that you
may not hear, and harden the heart that you
may not understand ; nay, you, who might not
seem to have had any special call that way, turn
aside to tell an oppressed people that liberty —
the liberty which Englishmen are never tired of
boasting about — is not among the things to
which they have any right.

136 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

In purely literary matters, likewise, we find
the same charming inconstancy to self dis-
tinguishing your career at nearly every point.
We find you raising an idol to-day, for no
better reason, as it should seem, than that you
might have the pleasure of demolishing it to-
morrow. Lest I might be accused of unfair-
ness and exaggeration by those who have not
had the pleasure of witnessing your almost in-
credible agility in changing front and colour,
let me quote one or two of your judgments side
by side. At one time we discover you praising
Byron, and pouring out your indignation upon
all who dare say a word against him. ' The
excellence of sincerity and strength,' you say,
* without these no poet can live ; but few have
ever had so much of them as Byron.' As the
natural corollary to that take the following : —
' He ' (Byron) ' can only claim to be acknow-
ledged as a poet of the third class, who now
and then rises into the second, but speedily
relapses into the lower element where he was
born. . . . How very bad it ' (his lordship's un-
fortunate poetry) c was ; how very hollow were
its claims ; how very ignorant, impudent, and

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 137

foolish was the rabble rout of its adorers. . . .
In all the composition of his highly composite
nature there was neither a note of real music
nor a gleam of real imagination.' Truly there
is no craven fear of inconsistency to be dis-
covered there.

Again, look on these two pictures : ' His
glorious courage, his excellent contempt for
things contemptible, and hatred of hateful men,
are enough of themselves to embalm and endear
his memory in the eyes of all who are worthy to
pass judgment on him.'

' The malevolent and cowardly conceit of a
Byron, ever shuffling and swaggering, and cring-
ing, and back-biting in a breath.' Once more
look at the noble partisanship that flies to arms
whenever the name or fame of the revered one
is menaced. 'At the first chance given or
taken, every obscure and obscene thing that
lurks for pay or prey among the fouler shallows
and thickets of literature flew against him ;
every hound and every hireling lavished upon
him the loathsome tribute of their abuse; all
nameless creatures that nibble and prowl, upon
whom the serpent curse has fallen to go upon

138 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

his belly and eat dust all the days of his life,
assailed him with their foulest venom and their
keenest fangs.'

later on there was nothing discoverable in
Bryon but * grandiose meanness,' and ' faithless-
ness.' Clearer judgment said that he had no
honour, that he was a sneak, had no great regard
for the truth, and, in a general way, was no
gentlemen.

Unhappy Byron ! To be kissed and caressed,
extolled, defended, and then cast into the gutter
and trampled on, is not a desirable fate. And,
what are we to say of him who does the kissing,
and the caressing, and the extolling, and the
trampling ? At one time the noble qualities of
Byron were enough ' to embalm and endear his
memory in the eyes of all who are worthy to
pass judgment on him,' but now — now alas ! all
that is changed. Or, is it that Mr. Algernon
Charles Swinburne is no longer worthy to pass
judgment on him ? The moralist assures us
that man changes.

At one time you spoke respectfully of the
' great character ' of Carlyle, but lest you should
be suspected of remaining too long of one mind

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 139

you have since denounced the 'great character'
in such Billingsgate as certainly is no credit to
the literature of the day. Nor are these the
only cases in which you exhibit your fascinating
variableness.

To take just one more instance out of many.
There was a time when you sent a fervent
message of admiration and esteem to the vener-
able poet of America — Walt Whitman — in this
strain : —

' Send but a song over sea for us,

Heart of their hearts who are free.
Heart of their singer, to be for us
More than our singing can be ;
Ours, in the tempest at error,
With no light but the twilight of terror,
Send us a song over the sea.'

But now Walt Whitman is a clod-hopper, with
as little music and as little imagination as the
charlatan and impostor Byron. In one of your
critical pieces you say, 'Sir Walter Scott was
neither a profound nor a pretentious critic,
neither a refined nor an eccentric theorist, but
his judgments have always the now more than
ever invaluable qualities of clearness and con-
sistency.' What a double-edged sword criticism

140 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

is, to be sure ! I wonder if any writer coming
after us will have courage enough to say that
the writings of Algernon Charles Swinburne
have the invaluable quality of consistency. I
wonder, also, if any subsequent critic can find
it in his heart to attribute humility to them.
'There is small chance of truth at the goal,'
says Coleridge, 'where there has not been a
childlike humility at the starting-post.' Neither
at start, nor at finish, do you ever seem to me
to be oppressed by any humility.

And yet, let me candidly confess, that to my
mind you have given us some of the very best
criticism which has directed the taste of this
generation. Those very qualities which under
the influence of prejudice make you so perverse
and so misleading, make you, when free from
prepossession, a valuable and companionable
critic. To the first-rate critic three things are
essential, perspicacity, sympathy, and inde-
pendence. The last you invariably have, the
two former you have when you are at your
best ; as, for instance, in your Study of Shake-
speare, and your Study of Victor Hugo, and
your various criticisms on Shelley. I question

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 141

if there is in the language a better 'Study'
of Shakespeare than yours. It is sympathetic ;
it glows with noble appreciation ; it is lumin-
ous and just; in some parts really creative,
and it always transcends the commonplace.
The best way to understand Shakespeare is, of
cdurse, to read him, but those who wish to get
at his best points by the short and easy byway
of criticism cannot do better than take you for
their guide. And, indeed, inasmuch as Shake-
speare is often obscure in his greatness, the
most intelligent readers might profit by a peru-
sal of your book. I do not say that you light
up the whole of Shakespeare — that perhaps
were impossible save to an intellect as great as
his own — but you do illumine in many dark
places, and even where such is not the case,
your writing is valuable and interesting simply
as a piece of literature.

Your Hugo, also, is a masterly performance
— masterly in its grasp, its liberality, its contempt
for conventionalities, its force, its sweep and
splendour of diction; In it, better than in any
recent criticisms which I can at the moment of
writing think of, one sees how happily and

142 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

beneficially the understanding and imagination
can work together. It would be hard, I think,
to give a more compendious estimate of Victor
Hugo and his work in a single sentence than
the following : — ' In the first poem ' (the * Con-
templations') 'a sublime humility finds such
expression as should make manifest to the
dullest eye, not clouded by malevolence and
insolent conceit, that when this greatest of
modern poets asserts in his own person the
high prerogative, and assumes for his own spirit
the high office of humanity to confront the
darkest problem, and to challenge the utmost
force of intangible and invisible justice as of
visible and tangible iniquity ; of all imaginable
as of all actual evil ; of superhuman indifference
as well as of human wrongdoing; it is no
merely personal claim that he puts forward, no
vain egotistic arrogance that he displays; but
the right of a reasonable conscience, and the
duty of a righteous faith, common to all men
alike, in whom intelligence of right and wrong,
perception of duty or conception of conscience,
can be said to exist at all.'

The book abounds in high and noble pas-

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 143

sages — passages that lift one away out of the
common atmosphere altogether, and reveal
other worlds than we are accustomed to look
upon.

It is written of course in a spirit of frank
admiration, almost idolatry. There are many
expressions throughout it that one's calmer
judgment might be inclined to tone down; many
epithets that the critical mind, in its normal icy
condition, might be disposed to consider hyper-
bolical; but the judicious reader will overlook all
that and think only of the noble admiration of one
poet for another, and the eloquence that dazzles
and enchants. Your Victor Hugo is, with the
possible exception of your Shakespeare, if even
it can be made an exception, your best work in
prose. It is a work which almost deserves to
live beside the works of even

1 That one whose name gives glory,
One man whose life makes light,
One crowned and throned in story
Above all empires' height.'

Your work as a poet still remains to be con-
sidered. In it, as in so much of your prose, you
are an unequal, an erratic, and tantalising crafts-

144 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

man, much given to paradox and often not a
little mysterious. Your poetry is hard to test
by any accepted standard, for you are a man of
new departures. You cannot be considered a
useful poet, as Mr. Birrell once designated your
opponent in so many rights, the late Matthew
Arnold. I am not quite sure, indeed, what the
author of Obiter Dicta meant by the word use-
ful. Either my memory is treacherous, or he
was not particularly explicit on the point. He
could not, I should think, have meant that a
poet ought to enter into competition with stock-
brokers, and advise us, in versified circulars, as
to the best and readiest means of making money.
That could hardly have been his meaning. Nor
could he have meant that our singers ought to
give hints on household management. I have
no doubt whatever that recipes in verse, and
axioms of domestic economy in rhyme, would be
highly interesting, though, I dare say, the cook
would prefer her instructions, and the housewife
her hints, in plain prose. The exigencies of
rhyme are so great that mistakes would almost
certainly be made if the poet were to invade the
kitchen. Therefore Mr. Birrell could not have

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 145

meant that. Nor could he have meant that it
is the poet's duty to consider whether or not the
working-man ought to buy his provisions in co-
operative stores. All that, I should imagine, is
outside the sphere of the singer. Of course
poets can be useful in a way. They are known
to be authorities on all erotic questions, so that
they might fairly be expected to help an
awkward and bashful bachelor in the choice
of a wife. But so far as things practical are
concerned, this is about all that a poet in his
poetical capacity could do. To be sure there
are higher and less direct ways of being useful ;
but in these I do not think that your work is of
any appreciable value. I do not think any one
would go to you for solace in the hour of trouble,
or for encouragement in the hour of doubt and
despair. What, then, are your claims as a poet ?
Perhaps your own answer is the best that could
be given. * The test of the highest poetry,' you
say in one of your essays, ' is that it eludes all
tests. Poetry in which there is no element at
once perceptible and indefinable by any reader
or hearer of poetic instinct may have every
other good quality, but it is not poetry — above
K

146 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

all, it is not lyric poetry — of the first water.
There must be something in the mere progress
and resonance of the words, some secret in the
very motion and cadence of the lines, inexpli-
cable by the most sympathetic acuteness of
criticism. Analysis may be able to explain how
the colours of this flower of poetry are created
and combined, but never of what process its
odour is produced.' Excellently put, and true,
too, in a sense. But you know extremes meet.
If the highest poetry is indefinable, so, also, is
the lowest. Genius and insanity, philosophers
tell us, walk hand in hand, and their utterances
are sometimes hard to distinguish ; so that while
it may be perfectly true that the highest poetry
is indefinable, such a test does not always suffice
to show us what really is poetry, and what is not.
Mr. Robert Montgomery was considered a great
poet until Macaulay took him in hand ; and his
poetry certainly was indefinable. I am not sure,
however, that its flowers had any odour, unless,
being rooted in the nether regions, they smelled
of brimstone ; so that might have been a guide
in estimating their value. Apart, however, from
all whimsical speculations, if we are to test you

MR. ALGERNON C. SWINBURNE. 147

by your own standard you certainly are a poet.
Your poetry, as I have said, does not comfort
nor give heart, differing in that respect from the
poetry of the world's greatest sons of song ; but
much of it is perfectly indefinable, in the best
sense of that word. Like Shelley's and Cole-
ridge's it depends a great deal on 'the mere
progress and resonance of the words.' It is not
stimulating poetry that is so dependent. It is
not the poetry of Shakespeare, nor the poetry of
Dante, nor even the poetry of Wordsworth.
But, in your case, it is poetry all the same. As
a specimen let us take the following from ' The
Garden of Cymodoce ' —

' O flower of all wind flowers and sea flowers,

Made lovelier by love of the sea
Than thy golden own field flowers or tree flowers

Like foam of the sea- facing tree !
No foot but the sea-mew's there settles

On the spikes of thine anther-like horns,
With snow-coloured spray for thy petals,

Black rocks for the thorns.'

There is not much there to lay hold on, yet
one feels instinctively that it is poetry; and
most of your ' thunderous verse ' is as light and
intangible. As a dramatist I cannot notice your

148 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

work further than to say, that in parts of your
dramas you seem to be at your best ; and that
here and there, particularly in Mary Stuart and
Atalanta in Calydon, you show a high and rare
power, and a grasp of character, for which such
poems as ' Songs before Sunrise ' would not
prepare one.

1 1. M.I, CAINE.

To MR. HALL CAINE.

SIR, — If I were to make a prediction as to
which of the younger novelists of England should
ultimately take the lead — should, to quote
Mr. Buchanan, ' rise in the end to genuine
eminence, to the sad sunless aureole of fame,' I
think I should name you. To many I dare say
my choice would appear singular, for there are
some of your younger contemporaries in the
field of fiction who have been received with
fourfold the acclaim ever accorded to you.
Yet, in spite of this discouraging fact, there
is not one among those who are still on the
upward grade whose work seems to me at once
so excellent a thing as it stands, and so splendid
an earnest of what is to come. The Deemster,
for example, besides being a fine piece of work
in itself, full of power and vital human interest,
is perhaps the most magnificent pledge of com-
ing achievement in the realm of imaginative

149

150 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

prose that has been given to the English people
for at least a decade. Indeed, it is a book
so rich in promise that one might not un-
reasonably regard its writer as the possible
successor of Scott. Certainly in it he has what
Mr. Lowell calls * the large stride of the elder
race.' The book belongs to the big, the broad,
the strong and impressive order of fiction. It
has a spaciousness of air, an unconventionally,
and a reach of imagination which make it rare
among recent novels. Apart from the prospect
which it holds out, if I were to call it one of
the best things done by any living English
novelist I might be accused of exaggeration,
yet I think the statement would be tolerably
near the truth. Some of Mr. Hardy's novels,
and at least one of Mr. Blackmore's, surpass it,
in my estimation, in the requirements of high
art as well perhaps as in general power, but
that, I think, can be said of no work but theirs.
In saying this, I do not forget the claims of Mr.
Meredith, whose wit and penetration are un-
equalled among latter-day writers of fiction, if
not indeed among writers of fiction of any day.
Moreover, I suspect that he excels you in single

MR. HALL CAINE. 151

scenes. In these he is sometimes unmatchable.
Some parts of The Egoist are almost Shake-
spearian in their impressiveness, and are as-
suredly among the strongest in the entire range
of British fiction ; yet I think that as an organic
whole, The Egoist hardly equals The Deemster ;
and I should be disposed to say that if Sir
Willoughby Patterne is one of the characters of
the century, Daniel Mylrea is another. There
is, of course, no. resemblance between the two
characters; nor are your literary methods the
least like those of Mr. Meredith. He is finical
and elaborate, an artist in phrase, a wit taking
the keenest delight in sparkling and pungent
witticisms, and prepared at any moment to
sacrifice the heart for the head. You, on the
other hand, are comparatively indifferent to
literary decoration, and pay more heed to the
emotions than to the intellect. Elaborate, in a
literary sense, you certainly are not, nor do you
pay any assiduous court to the Comic Muse.
You have apparently no time to coin epigrams ;
if you have humour you never jest ; satire you
indulge in sparely, and your moral reflections
are rather hammer-strokes than sermons. Dante

152 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

himself is not more economical of words. In
The Deemster the effects are rendered with
almost unexampled rapidity. The imagination
seems all aglow, and will not be checked in
pouring out its shapes. Indeed, if one were
inclined to cavil at anything in the book, one
would say that the pace is too impetuous, that
the artist, eager to catch his own conceptions
in their virgin force and freshness, dashed them
on canvas, with little regard to finish or tech-
nical detail. This, I take it, is because you
approach your subject from the human instead
of the literary side. Such is not the method in
fashion now, but it is the method of all the
masters, from Cervantes and Scott down.
Humanity first, literary embellishments after-
wards. With you the latter receive perhaps
too scant attention ; and, as a consequence,
your work, compared with that of some of your
contemporaries, has an occasional aspect of
bluntness. But, on the other hand, no exer-
cise of technical skill, no verbal ornamentation,
could add one whit to the vividness of the
pictures presented. One forgets the abruptness
of style in the absorbing interest of the story,

MR. HALL CA1NE. 153

and the fierce masterfulness of the characters ;
for they have a primitive strength that is over-
whelming.

One hears, indeed, enough, and more than
enough, about style ; and is glad to have it
sometimes thrust into the background \ to feel
that the life of a book lies in the matter, not in
the manner, and that forceful thought is never
without fit expression. We are all stylists in
this age. We can play tricks with words that
would astonish our ancestors, could they hear
them, as I dare say they will astonish posterity.
From M. Daudet to Mr. Stevenson and Mr.
Howells, the cry is so much for style, that one
is often reminded of Richter's gibe, that want
of matter makes one think too much of lan-
guage. The inordinate and irrational stress
which is at present laid on style in some
quarters makes it with many not a means, but
an end. It is as if the mathematician thought
only of his instruments, or the chemist of his
crucible. Mr. James, for instance, is so clever
a stylist that in those curious books which he
designates novels he can altogether dispense
with humanity and its sorry traits and passions,

154 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

and with plot and its ridiculous evolutions,
and entertain the reader with neat phrases, and
elegant and elaborate paragraphs about nothing.
A wonderful achievement, betokening great
ingenuity ; but surely literature ought to be
something more than a species of legerdemain.
Do not suppose that I depreciate style. In a
Hawthorne I enjoy the grace and ductility of
language, but then Hawthorne has a forceful
thought here and there, by way of variety ; and
it may be it is this concession to old-fashioned
tastes that draws me along. The James school
is too * superior ' to do anything of the sort.
It will put the dictionary on the rack for you
with pleasure ; if you want more, well, it will
answer with many regrets that what you desire
is not in its line. And it must be admitted
that anything like force would indeed be an
odd anomaly in its pages. As Mr. Buchanan
recently reminded us, it is exceedingly ill-bred
to think, feel, or act strongly, according to the
James code of manners.

I am afraid you are ill-bred, for, while you
are comparatively negligent of style, you think
forcibly, and would seem to feel forcibly, for

MR. HALL CAINE. 155

you make the reader feel forcibly \ and what
say Horace and Mr. Walter Besant on that
matter? Mr. Howells, to be sure, laughs at
the idea that an author is ever moved by his
own work. But then it might be questioned
whether Mr. Howells's laugh is conclusive on
the point. There are scenes in The Deemster
and A Son of Hagar that could hardly have
been written in cold blood. At any rate, I
think it would be hard to read some of them
in cold blood — that one, for instance, in which
the blind Mercy Fisher and her child appear
for the last time, or that other on the Tynwald
Hill, when a father strikes himself to the heart
in sentencing the son he loves to perpetual
banishment, or that further one on the top of
Orris Head, where the cousins fight to the
death. These are one or two scenes from
among many that might be named which I
think might move even Mr. Howells. The
death of Mercy Fisher is as pathetic as that of
her betrayer, Hugh Ritson, is tragic, while the
scene on the Tynwald Hill is a thing which
once read of can never be forgotten. The
integrity, the stern justice of the judge, and the

156 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

agony of the father in cutting off, as it were,
his own right arm, are admirably described. I
seriously do not think that Walter Scott or
Victor Hugo has anything better. Certainly
neither ever rises to a greater tragic height.

But your strength does not lie so much in
-detached scenes as in ' the entirety of expres-
sion and the cumulative effect of many par-
ticulars working toward a common end.' Like
a true artist your study is to evolve character,
not to present it in brilliant patches. And the
manner in which the characters of Hugh Ritson
and Daniel Mylrea are unfolded is, throughout,
masterly, and shows true sense of proportion as
well as the continuous working of the imagina-
tion. Your men are better than your women,
though Mercy Fisher and Mona are well and
naturally drawn. Perhaps as you proceed you
will pay more attention to your female char-
acters, and thus give more sweetness with
your strength.

And as you are still young, your future will
be watched with interest by all who have the
welfare of our English literature at heart. You
have shown that you are capable of great things ;

MR. HALL CAINE. 157

you have also shown, or at least hinted, that
your aims are as high as your talents. In a
recent magazine article you wrote that, ' Already
the world seems to be growing weary of feeble
copies of feeble men and feeble manners. It
wants more grit, more aim, more thought, and
more imagination. . . . Dugald Stewart said
that human invention, like the barrel organ,
was limited to a specific number of tunes.
The present hurdy-gurdy business has been
going on a longish time. We are threatened
with the Minerva Press over again, and the
class of readers who see no difference between
Walter Scott and John Gait. But, free of the
prudery of the tabernacle and the prurience of
the boulevard, surely the novel has a great
future before it. Its possibilities seem to be
nearly illimitable. . . . To break down the
superstitions that separate class from class ; to
show that the rule of the world is right, and
that, though evil chance plays a part in life,
yet that life is worth living, these are among
the functions of the novelist.'

In truth the time seems ripe for energetic and
aggressive action in extending the scope of the

158 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

novel. It has long enough conformed to anti-
quated models, and been a slavish caterer to
illiberal — to use no harsher word — tastes. But
it has not altogether been the fault of the un-
lucky novelist that so much of our fiction has
been, and is, ' a tawdry and hollow article suited
for immediate use and immediate oblivion.'
The blame must be shared by the public, and
to some extent also by its tutors the critics.
While conditions of life were perpetually chang-
ing, while civilisation was giving her luminous
and benignant impress to whole new continents,
while science, to borrow an expressive phrase
from Mr. Gladstone, was progressing by leaps
and bounds, while the stream of general know-
ledge, swollen by new streams and unexpected
confluents, was overflowing all ancient boun-
daries, and deluging the country of thought far
and wide, the venerable standards of fiction,
surviving mutation and vicissitude, remained as
fixed and unalterable as the laws of the Medes
and Persians, and the unhappy novelist had the
choice of conforming or starving. Being human,
he preferred to have bread, and so art suffered.
But there are signs of a change ; better things

MR. HALL CA1NE. 159

seem to be in store for us, and the fact that
The Deemster has enjoyed a fair measure of
popularity shows a hopeful tendency in public
taste.

A great deal has been and is being written
about realism and romance, as if the two were
divided by a fence, or as if great writers were
not realistic and romantic by turns, and when
it suited them. And it is certain that in giving
the novel a wider scope, the novelist will press
both realism and romance into his service, for
in each lie essences of humanity which he can-
not well neglect. But I fancy, though I express
an opinion with all diffidence, that pure romance
can scarcely ever regain the position it once
occupied, and I should be inclined to regard
the phenomenal success of certain recent ex-
ploits in the way of revival rather as confirm-
ing than contradicting this view. The diffusion
of intelligence, the progress of science, the
greater familiarity with, and better comprehen-
sion of, the phenomena of Nature, the keen,
mechanical, materialistic bent of the age (I
speak in no theological sense) seem to me fatal
to the supremacy of pure romance. The most

160 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

potent accessories to illusion are gone. Super-
stition no longer stalks at large to assist and
stimulate the imagination. Faith is dying, and
a spirit of haughty agnosticism is abroad. The
same power which increases our material com-
forts diminishes our imaginative pleasures.
Nature, in bestowing one talent, demands the
surrender of another, and this exchange and
barter, if beneficial on one side, is inimical on
the other. We are not in all respects the same
as our fathers have been. We are more cul-
tured than they were, more sceptical, more
cynical, and (in our own estimation at least)
harder to impose on. It would be absurd to
predict that we shall never have another great
romance on the lines of Ivanhoe or Don Quixote.
To genius all things are possible. Given a Titan
and we shall have titanic achievements. But
the fact that once upon a time Samson walked
placidly off with the Gates of Gaza hardly
warrants us in expecting to see the performance
repeated. The feat of writing romance in the
old sense is daily becoming more and more
difficult, and not less from the change in the
writer himself than from the altered attitude

MR. HALL CA1NE. 161

of the audience. The imagination of a cul-
tured man is apt to cower before his intellect,
ashamed of its airy nothings; and if in so
recent a figure as Goethe we see the highest
culture and the boldest imagination working
in unison we but behold the exception that
proves the rule.

The great novel of the future is likely to
steer a middle course between Scylla and
Charybdis. It will combine the best elements
of realism and romance. The coming novelist
will do away with all arbitrary limitations.
Remembering that the primitive element in
man is never wholly eradicated, he will not
neglect the romantic, he will not disdain to
minister to the emotions ; and, always conscious
of the forward march of the world, the passing
away of so many old things, and the advent of
so many new, he will strive to give aesthetic
expression to the manners and forms of life
about him. But he will copy nature as an
artist, not as a photographer, and he will take of
the temporary only what tends to illustrate the
perennial. He has no right to be a bald his-
torian or chronicler of small talk, or scientist, or
L

1 62 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

political economist, or even a philanthropist
except in so far as the best art is always phil-
anthropic. His mission will be to exhibit
human motives and passions under the new
lights of the new times. He will delight in
novel situations. He will not shrink from
showing human frailty; but he will not gloat
over it nor divorce it from the virtues by
which, save in rare and exceptional cases, it is
accompanied. And above all and beyond all,
he will not forget that it is of man's soul to
man's soul he is speaking. You, I believe,
keep this in mind, and it is mainly because
of this that you have done so well in the past,
and give so rich a promise for the future.

ROBKKT i.ouis STI-:VI-:\SO\.

To MR. ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON.

SIR, — Your countryman, Carlyle, has said
that 'could ambition always choose its own
path, and were will in human undertakings syno-
nymous with faculty, all truly ambitious men
would be men of letters.' Not only have you
chosen the envied path, but you are treading
it with very eminent success. A very wide
circle of readers is waiting impatiently to catch
your every word, if not quite as if you were a
Delphic oracle pouring out celestial wisdom, at
least as if you were a wizard that could for a
little charm them into forgetfulness of the fret
and fume of this feverish life. Moreover, the
critics are almost unanimously with you, more
unanimously perhaps than with any other British
author of the day, certainly far more unani-
mously than with any of our younger authors; so
that it may be justly said you have conquered,

163

164 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

and are fairly entitled to the honours and the
spoils of the victor — to the laurel crown and
the golden guineas, or, as vulgar people say, to
the pudding and the praise.

It is no mean achievement to make a name
in English letters even to-day ; for despite the
dolorous croaking of pessimists, and the sapient
head-shaking of octogenarians, filled with fables
of the past, there is really a good deal of
literary talent in England at present. If she
has fewer intellectual giants than in ages that
are gone, the average stature is incomparably
greater. If no Hamlets or Tom Joneses or
Kenilworths are being produced, we turn out
manufactures in every way superior to the Oliver
Twists and the Pelhams of a preceding genera-
tion. So long as we have men like yourself
labouring in the realm of fiction we may hold
up our heads with self-respect, and feel that our
appearance, if, not very portly or imposing, is at
least eminently respectable. We might be out
of place in a chariot, but we are quite equal to
the dignity of a gig.

Public men, it was long ago observed, are
public property ; this is peculiarly the case with

MR. ROBERT LOUfS STEVENSON. 165

authors. I do not exceed my proprietary rights,
then, in glancing briefly at what you have ac-
complished, and examining the ground whereon
your fame rests. You have been active in many
departments. According to your own statement
you have written innumerable dramas, which
have never seen the light. Presumably they were
not worth publishing ; for it is not your habit to
withhold anything that could be of any possible
interest to your literary admirers. So con-
siderate are you in this respect, indeed, that at
an early age you have given the world personal
memoirs such as most authors reserve either for
posthumous publication, or for publication at
the very close of their careers. But there is no
valid reason in the world why an author should
not publish his memoirs when it suits him ; and
the time is perhaps at hand when a writer will
make his first appeal to the public with a volume
of gossip about his baby playmates, and the
troubles of teething - time. Your memoirs,
though not without a touch of egotism, as some
think, are so interesting that we shaU be glad to
have more when you have matter and leisure.
Your chief work, however, has been in the

1 66 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

realms of poetry, criticism, and romance. I
dare say you would yourself be readiest to ac-
knowledge that, if you had not been first favour-
ably known as a prose writer, your poetry would
hardly have gained you recognition. You have
publicly attributed your success to your dire
industry ; and it is in reading your poetry rather
than your prose that we see how just is your esti-
mate of your own endowments. 'An infinite capa-
city for taking trouble' does not always fitly take
the place of inspiration. In your A Child's Garden
of Verses there are many neat, sweet, and happy
little things suited to the tender age of childhood,
but nothing, or very little, that would prove
nutritious at a maturer period of life. I do not
mean to imply that the book is aught but what
it should be. It is excellent of its kind, only
that kind is hardly high enough to justify one in
giving you the title of poet. In Undenvoods
you take a more ambitious flight, and as ambi-
tion, while carrying a man triumphantly over
many obstacles, exhibits his weakness no less
than his strength, so in this book the limitations
of your genius are sharply emphasised. Through-
out the volume the mighty impress of Burns, to

MR. ROBER T LO UIS STE VENSON. 1 67

quote a phrase from Mr. Lowell, is distinctly
visible. Like Shakespeare, Burns is so exceed-
ingly natural that we are often betrayed into the
self-delusion of imagining that what he has done
with such apparent ease we also can do. The
number of dramatists that the Stratford poacher
has made is probably beyond computation, and
Scotland is overrun with minor poets who would
never have sung a note but for the Ayrshire,
ploughboy. You are, of course, a man of too
wide a culture to limit yourself to a single model,
nor would your sense of fitness ever permit you
to go wholly on the lines of one who must ever
remain, more or less, an alien to the great mass
of the English people. Burns can never be
thoroughly appreciated by Englishmen, and it
is to Englishmen that you especially appeal.
Still, in Underwoods, the influence of Burns is
paramount, particularly in what I may call the
personal section of the book. In short the work
is imitative, and hardly takes high rank for
originality. Perhaps it was merely a tour de
force. If so, we may read it and enjoy it, and
lay it aside, treating it in no more serious spirit
than did the author.

1 68 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

In criticism you show to more advantage.
To be sure, you are not absolutely without
bias, and a biased critic is not to be implicitly
trusted. You have called Tom Jones dull ; and
thereby drawn down on yourself the solemn
admonitions of Mr. Augustine Birrell, and the
sportful and partial anger of your friend, Mr.
Andrew Lang. We cannot let you call the work
of Henry Fielding dull and rank you as a great
critic. But you have made amends for this little
fantasy by being judicial in other directions.

Your judgments on Scott, and Dumas, and Vic-
tor Hugo, and Hawthorne, are, in the main, just;
you have sufficient perspicacity to see, and suffi-
cient candour to acknowledge, that Zola is not
a blockhead ; and you have courageously con-
demned the moral delinquencies of your poetic
model, Burns. But while you have done some-
thing in verse, and given us one or two volumes
of agreeable criticism, your true sphere is fiction.
It is on your romances that you would yourself
rest your claim to fame ; and it is as a writer of
romance that you are most widely known and
most warmly admired.

When Kidnapped^ which, I understand, you

MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 169

consider your ' best, indeed your only good,
story,' was published, one enthusiastic journal
said it was as good as anything in Carlyle, and
far truer. I confess the aptness of the remark
did not strike me on perusing the book ; but
that is of little consequence. Another journal,
equally generous, called it as good as Rob Roy.
This last was very high praise indeed, and must
have been peculiarly gratifying to you for three
reasons — first, because the journal which gave
the verdict was one of weight and influence ;
second, because you place Scott at the head of
all writers of romance ; and, third, because Rob
Roy is, on your own confession, an especial
favourite of yours. That you could wholly
agree with the verdict, however, is more than I
believe ; for you can hardly imagine yourself
just yet entitled to share Sir Walter's pedestal.

For myself, on reading Kidnapped I did
not think it quite as good as Rob Roy. But
I thought that for a boy's book, it was in many
respects too good — that your fine gift of charac-
terisation was virtually thrown away ; for as you
once observed yourself, boys do not care much
for the study of character. If they did there

1 70 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

would be but a poor chance for some books
which are enjoying considerable popularity. It
struck me, then, that your study of character
was too fine, especially your study of the cha-
racter of Alan Breck Stewart. But while think-
ing this, the manner in which that gentleman is
drawn gave me the keenest delight. ' Here,' I
said to myself, curiously enough, anticipating
Mr. Augustine Birrell, — ' here we have another
splendid portrait added to the gallery of Scot-
tish heroes of fiction.' That was my first im-
pression. Further reflection, however, brought
an ugly suspicion that the portrait was not en-
tirely original after all; that, in fact, it had
merely been taken down and touched up ac-
cording to the latest canons in art. I felt as if
I had met the redoubtable Alan Breck some-
where before ; in other vestments, it is true, and
engaged in other pursuits, but surely the same
man. Where had I seen him ? Was it in some
previous state of existence, or only in a dream
of the night ? Sudden as a flash came the re-
velation. To be sure I had seen either him or
his double before, — once when he was surrep-
titiously lifting his neighbour's cattle, and again

MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 171

when he was holding complacent argument, —
like the daring rascal that he was — with a magi
strate in the Tolbooth of Glasgow. { Ah, eh, oh ! '
I exclaimed, falling, in my surprise, into the man-
ner and dialect of the worthy Bailie Nicol Jar-
vie. ' My conscience, it 's impossible — and yet
— no! conscience it canna be; and yet again —
Deil hae me ! that I should say sae, ye robber,
ye cateran — ye born deevil that ye are to a' bad
ends and nae gude ane — can this be you ? ' and
calmly came the laconic rejoinder. * E'en as
ye see.' I may be mistaken, but it certainly
seems to me that the lineaments of Mr. Stewart
too distinctly suggest those of Mr. Macgregor.
However, while saying this, let me hasten to
confess that I think Kidnapped the most de-
lightfully written boy's book which has appeared
for at least a decade. It is the work of one
who is an artist, and not a mere sensation-
monger.

Of Prince Otto likewise one must speak with
qualification. It is full of charming writing,
but the characters are occasionally shadowy,
and no amount of literary decoration will
make a work of fiction tolerable in which the

172 LE TTERS TO LI VI NG A UTHORS.

characters are not under all circumstances and at
all times thoroughly alive. The reader scarcely
succeeds in getting into sympathy either with the
fantastic prince or his scheming wife ; and it is
hard to believe that you ever were in thorough
sympathy with them yourself. TJiere is one
part of the book, however, that could scarcely
be improved, and that is the description of the
flight of the Princess Seraphina when she finds
the game up and the palace on fire. There
is something like real inspiration in that pas-
sage. The picture of the conflagration, and the
wretched flying woman remains with the
reader long after he has forgotten all else.

Of The Black Arrow it is better I should
not speak, for I hold that an author should be
judged by his best performances, not by his
worst.

Besides novels and tales you have written
short stories, in which you have done yourself
perfect justice. With the single exception of
Mr. Thomas Hardy, no living British writer so
well understands, or so well succeeds in, this
extremely difficult branch of fiction as yourself.
But here again we have to be on our guard

MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 173

against superlatives and false standards. The
short story does not flourish in these Islands.
They do these things better not only in France,
but among our own kinsmen in America. Com-
parisons, as Dogberry sagely observed, are odo-
rous, indeed they are malodorous, and I will
not mention names ; but I dare say you would
be among the first to admit that so far as short
stories are concerned British authors are not in
the running with their Transatlantic brethren.
Nevertheless your stories are distinctly good.
Thrawn Janet is a first-class ' bogle ' story of
the kind one might hear any winter's evening
by the ingle of a Scottish farmer or peasant, and
The Merrymen never lacks interest if it some-
times lacks probability.

And now, just a word regarding your work
in general. Mr. Andrew Lang has stated that,
since Thackeray, no Englishman of letters has
been gifted with, or has acquired, so charming
or original a style as yours. That is substan-
tially true. Your style is facile, quaint, and
suggestive : often it is brilliant and always dis-
tinctive. Moreover, it has that subtle charm
which lures one on one knows not how. In

174 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

drilling yourself in the art of the novelist you
have studied widely, and one sees in your work
the influence of many masters. You have bor-
rowed something from Hugo, from Dumas, from
Scott, from Poe, from Hawthorne, and many
others. But in the matter of style you are
chiefly indebted to Hawthorne — the best stylist,
to my mind, in the entire range of that huge
mass of fiction which is widely styled English.
To say that your style resembles his is no more
than the truth. There are parts of Prince
Otto which Nathaniel Hawthorne might have
written; especially might he have written that
part, already referred to, which describes the
flight and the bitter feelings of the Princess
Seraphina. That I think is your high water-
mark so far as style goes, and to say that it is
worthy of the author of The Scarlet Letter is
but to say that it would be hard to match it in
contemporary literature.

Nor in the enumeration of your qualities
should your humour be forgotten. Nothing is
rarer in literature than true humour; and in
these days of spasmodic and dreary jesting,
when the Comic Muse so often presents the

MR. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 175

appearance of a draggled and broken-winded
jade — when her skirts are so often foul with
the mire of the slums, and her breath hot with
the fumes of the pot-house, it is pleasant to
meet her in her native state, — trim, light,
graceful, and clean, — a shepherdess in her
laughing robes. Your humour is genuine and
spontaneous, and pervades all you write. It
does not show itself in caricature, nor in horse-
play, but rises naturally from the heart of the
matter like a gushing spring from the hard
rock to refresh the thirsty wayfarer. It is in
your humour that you are most original, and
perhaps most delicious.

To MR. ANDREW LANG.

SIR, — If shades be capable of envy, and one
sees no reason for doubting their capacity in
that way, that of the late Mr. Crichton, some-
time student at St. Andrews, must occasionally
have a rather uncomfortable time of it. To be
poet, critic, sportsman, wit, student, and pro-
fessor of Folk Lore, confidant and biographer
of fairies, novelist, parodist, anthropologist,
magazinist, journalist, humorist, and many other
-ists besides was not given to the most versatile
of foregoing men. He has, indeed, a tolerable
record in languages, if his history be not a fable,
or a ' muckle white lee,' as his own and your
countrymen would say ; but in literature his per-
formances were, after all, insignificant. Possibly
the dolorous ghost might complain, if it con-
descended to discuss the point at all, that
opportunities were scantier in the good old days
than in these degenerate ones ; that disputations

176

ANDREW LANG.

MR. ANDREW LANG. 177

in colleges were not so favourable for the dis-
play of mental power as the columns of the
daily, weekly, and monthly press. And perhaps
the ghost would be right. The world, on reliable
authority, is moving forward \ opportunities are
on the increase. And there is of course a cor-
responding increase in the power and ingenuity
of man. Every son of Adam progresses of
sheer necessity. Darwinism has proved that
he cannot stand still; nor can he go back to
his roost and caudal appendage, which ought to
be a consoling reflection. He is being con-
stantly ' evolved,' much as the ingenious novelist
evolves a character. Fresh faculties are, perhaps,
added ; at the very least old ones, which have
lain dormant since the days of our arboreal
ancestors, are developed and sharpened so as
to perform functions that are essentially new.
Hence it is that the pretensions of the Admirable
Crichtons of the past can hardly be matter for
serious consideration to-day. One would think
that the estimable geniuses of other days must
have something of the thankful feeling of Sir
Walter about having lived in ' the early days of
tradition,' when literary claims were not so
M

178 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

narrowly scanned as they are to-day, and when
versatility, not to speak of universality, was
practically a thing unknown. At any rate it has
been reserved for this wondrous century, which
has witnessed so many striking phenomena,
to mark with admiration the achievements of
one whose only imperfections might seem to be
that he is too sparing of sentiment, and some-
how disinclined to do justice to *M. de Howells '
and his sturdy compatriots.

Philosophers are wont to observe that man
is necessarily the creature of his age. None
can escape the influence of his time. Shake-
speare could not, nor Dante, nor Homer; and
how should lesser men expect to succeed
where the Titans failed ? You are part of your
age, yet not entirely of it. In some ways you
are a more satisfactory representative of the
latter half of the nineteenth century than the
Rev. Robert Elsmere himself. He represents
its narrowness ; you represent its breadth, its
many-sided culture, its neat and dainty univer-
sality. Our Time has as many arms as Briareus,
and can use them all with equal ease and equal
facility. You are 'grave and gay, lively and

MR. ANDREW LANG. 179

severe,' trifling and trenchant, as the need arises,
and one never catches you in a role which you
do not play to perfection. You not only do
your 'level best' at all times and under all
circumstances, but your level best is so good
that one could hardly wish it better. In all this
you represent your age; for despite a great deal
of violent assertion to the contrary, thorough-
ness is not unknown. Where you do not
represent your age is in its propensity to stoop.
I am inclined to think that, notwithstanding
your ' infinite capacity for taking trouble,' there
is not much of the grubbing Teuton in you.
You have more of the light and sportful spirit
of Ariel, than the heavy, dull respectability and
conscientiousness of purpose which we value so
much in the adorable Dryasdust. The good
creature is useful, he has a great talent for
going to the bottom of things, but unhappily he
often remains there ; he is the dray-horse of
literature, fit for drawing heavy loads over
cobble-stones ; your sphere is in the upper
regions, where the movement is swift and grace-
ful, and whence there is a comprehensive view
without danger of contamination.

i8o LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

One sees in you the odd anomaly of a
romantic scientist, or a scientific romancist —
which you will, a polished scholar who loves and
clings to the barbarous element in humanity,
a shrewd man of the world who might be
more than half suspected of a lingering belief
in certain pleasant superstitions regarding the
supernatural and other kindred things, which
are usually objects of contempt to the enlight-
ened man about town. On the critical side
none is keener, on the romantic or imaginative
few more credulous or blindly extravagant. On
occasion you can assume the callous, cold-
blooded manner of Matthew Arnold with an
appearance of perfect naturalness. You can
deal with the scientific novel in a scientific spirit,
and with the theological novel with a super-
ficial look of delight, as if you really relished
rattling among the dry bones in the desolate
valley. But the enjoyment is superficial, for
the occupation, I take it, is not much to your
taste. You are fonder of following the vagaries
of Walter Scott than of working out the perplex-
ing problems of the realist and the theologian.
One can imagine you throwing yourself on the

MR. ANDREW LANG. 181

sofa, after the style of a certain idle reader, and
exclaiming : ' Be mine to read eternal novels
by Walter Scott.' You write of brownies, bogles,
water-kelpies, border-feuds and forays with more
fervour than of the spiritual struggles of Deacon
Boozle, or the minute investigations of the
heart troubles of Miss Jemima Mildjoy, of
Boston, Mass. You have a keener relish of
Homer and Haggard than of the school which
describes life ' as it is.' Yet here again you are
odd, for you have defended good Henry
Fielding against the attacks of Mr. Stevenson,
and admitted — perhaps reluctantly and regret-
fully, but still made the admission — that Mr.
Henry James has accomplished the phenomenal
feat of writing three or four really interesting
novels about ' the young person ' of the capital
of New England. This shows that you can
appreciate the beauty and utility of the micro-
scope and the scalpel — with an effort. But
admiration for the thew and sinew of manhoodj
the spear and battle-axe, would seem to be in
the blood with you. Vigorous, buoyant, down-
right, above all successful, slaughter thrills you
with a grateful sense of satisfaction, perhaps

1 82 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

because in that particular you like thoroughness,
while dissection or vivisection would seem to
leave only an impression of petty sacrilege, or
cruelty. And to be sure, Sir Henry Curtis
hewing down rebellious Africans is a more
imposing spectacle than Silas Lapham under-
going an examination of his emotional machin-
ery. Every man to his taste. Some are born
heroic, some realistic, and there really seems to
be room enough in the world for both classes.

I have long thought that you are somewhat
too severe on our Transatlantic friends. To
the dead, indeed, you have done full justice.
Hawthorne has had your discriminating praise,
so has Poe, so has Longfellow. But the living
cannot boast of it save in the minutest frag-
ments. The robust young man from Topeka,
Kansas, in top-boots, buckskin, and sombrero,
has little but your sarcasm. He is an innova-
tion in literature, and you do not seem to take
to him kindly. I do not know whether you
have studied Cousin Jonathan at home ; I
should fancy, from the vigour of your prejudices
against him, you have not ; but if you will take
the word of one who has ' been there,' he is

MR. ANDREW LANG. 183

really a very fine fellow — in his own way. To
be sure he has his imperfections — a good crop
of them ; who has not ? He is brawny and
uncouth, and his spirits are sometimes too
boisterous for the sedate and the delicate. Be-
sides, he is not without conceit. He makes
himself out to be taller than he really is, and
pretends a total indifference to British opinion.
In reality, however, the dear fellow is very fond
of England, likes to visit it, and is extremely
sensitive to English criticism. It hurts him
when you sit on him. And I do not know that
it is good policy to laugh at him too much.
Washington Irving — the most genial spirit in
American literature — long ago pointed out the
danger of treating America as if she were in
every way — mental, moral, and social — an in-
ferior ; and a living author, whose pride or
patriotism is not greater than his general excel-
lence as a writer, has complained that Americans
are treated too much like children or clowns by
John Bull.

Moreover, it seems to me that on purely
intellectual grounds you scarcely mete out
justice to the Americans. Every man has a

1 84 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

weak point, most men have many such points,
and to some it might appear that your weak-
ness lies in what I may call your American
side. There is much to be said against the
Americans as a people, as there must be against
any people so young, so strong, so prosperous,
and with such an unexampled retrospect and
prospect — much to be said if one cared, or it
were profitable to say it. But if they have their
deficiencies, they have likewise their merits,
and all that they would ask for themselves is
that those merits be impartially considered.
' We must submit ourselves to the European
standard of weights and measures,' says Mr.
Lowell. 'That we have made the hitherto
biggest gun might excite apprehension (were
there a dearth of iron), but can never exact
respect. That our pianos and patent reapers
have won medals does but confirm us in our
mechanical and material measure of merit.
We must contribute something more than mere
contrivances for saving of labour, which we
have been only too ready to misapply in the
domain of thought and the higher kinds of
invention. In those Olympic games, where

MR. ANDRE W LA NG. 1 8 5

nations contend for truly immortal wreaths, it
may well be questioned whether a mowing-
machine would stand much chance in the
chariot races ; whether a piano, though made
by a chevalier, could compete successfully for
the prize of music.' They demand only simple
justice, and, to my mind, it is only simple
justice to let them have it. It is curious that
you, who have generally such an open eye for
all kinds of excellence, whether it be of the
grave or gay sort, should be so persistently
' down ' on the Americans, who, I think, have
at present amongst them some first-rate artists.
I do not think that it requires any effort — at
least I have never found it anything else than
a great pleasure — to read the novels of, let us
say, Mr. Cable or Miss Murfree. And in regard
to criticism, I read the * Editor's Study ' in
Harper's, and ' At the Sign of the Ship ' in
Longman's, with the same profit and delight.
As a certain poet says, ' Oh wad ye tak' a thocht
an' men" in that American business. The
sarcasm which is so keen, so cutting, so destruc-
tive, so entertaining, would not then be under
the suspicion of occasional unfairness.

1 86 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS,

For the rest, what is one to say? That if
you are not precisely the first of existing English
writers, you are by far the most versatile. I
think the statement might be seriously made,
and still keep on good terms with truth and con-
science. There may be writers who are more
trenchant — force is not, perhaps, your forte ;
there may be those who tear the heart out of a
subject more pitilessly ; there may even be a
few who are more diverting ; but I cannot at
present recall the name of one who goes round
the entire circle of intellectual activity with
greater apparent ease, or more consummate
grace. From Herodotus to Hawthorne, from
Theocritus to Thackeray, from Homer to Mr.
Rider Haggard, from Lucretius to Longfellow,
from the Customs of Primitive Man to the
Curiosities of Parish Registers, you glide with
easy and fascinating mastery. In most men
this versatility would be fatal. The productions
of * the mob of gentlemen who write with ease '
are not always, as Sheridan pointed out, the
easiest reading in the world. Not infrequently
they are a sore tax on patience. But you have
yet to learn the art of disappointing us. It is

MR. ANDREW LANG. 187

an art which, unfortunately, most writers master
comparatively early in life, and go on practising
with an assiduity and success that are occasion-
ally too much for the most friendly of readers.
But you, whether we agree with you or not
(and I may say that, on many things, your
views are not mine), are always interesting in
the sense in which Mr. Haggard's young lady
would use that word. Wherein lies the magic ?
In the subjects you choose ? As often as
otherwise they are perfectly commonplace in
themselves. ' I heard the Rev. Henry Ward
Beecher the other night,' said Mr. Sala once.
* I was delighted with him, and didn't agree
with a word he said.' What is this magic that
charms without convincing ? It clearly lies in
the man, and not in the matter.

One cause of your success with cultivated
readers is, undoubtedly, that you are primarily
a poet. There is something of the sunshine of
the fancy in all you write, even your most
hurried notes. The harp is struck carelessly —
no, not carelessly, but lightly, and often there
is only a passing note of music, but, like the
' Mesopotamia ' of Whitfield, it never fails to

1 88 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

fetch the reader. Another reason for your
success is that you are a humorist; and still
another, that you are never too much in earnest.
Earnest people are often rude, often tread,
and not always by accident, on the toes of
their best friends. We should as soon expect
clumsiness from M. Daudet, or cleanliness from
M. Zola, as rudeness from you. You can be
stern, you can be keen, you can hit mercilessly
in the joints of the harness, but your manner
will always be unimpeachable. You have
called Mr. Norris the successor of Thackeray.
Will you allow me to say that, of all living
writers, you seem to me to come nearest the
great master's manner. That rare penetration,
that perfect lucidity of thought, that light, yet
effective style, which seems merely sportive at
the first glance, yet cuts like a Damascus blade,
which belonged to Thackeray, belong also to
you. But I confess there are times when it
seems to me Thackeray might have hit straighter
from the shoulder with advantage. An honest
knock-down blow is a thing to admire, and be
grateful for on occasion. You are not, any
more than was the author of the Roundabout

MR. ANDREW LANG. 189

Papers, a Hercules — that is, you are averse to
the use of the club, when the club might be
more serviceable than the lighter weapons of
offence. One would like to see you ' tremen-
dously in earnest ' a little oftener. One would
like to see you take hold of the more serious
problems of life in a more serious spirit at
times. We may live in Mayfair now, but it
will not always be so. Life may have much
comedy in it, but it has more of tragedy, and
there are times when persiflage is barely toler-
able. Sentiment is a bad thing to parade, but
we like a writer at times to make us feel that he
has got a little of it in the closet. You have
just a trifle too much of the gift of self-repres-
sion, which is so needful to an artist, and yet
so fatal when exercised to excess. One often
thinks that if you had a touch of sentiment to
make your brilliancy mellow, you would be the
most charming of modern writers.

That you are capable of seriousness no one
who has read you will for a moment doubt.
Perhaps no more convincing instance could be
given of this little-known characteristic of your
literary genius than the sonnet with which you

190 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

preface your translation of the Odyssey. I con-
sider it one of the most beautiful things in
recent literature : —

' As one that for a weary space has lain,

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine,
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that ^Eaean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only the shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again, —
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech

Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free
Shrill winds beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And through the music of the languid hours
They hear, like ocean on a western beach,
The surge and thunder of the Odyssey. '

A little more in that high, free spirit would be
very grateful.

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.

To MR. WILLIAM DEAN
HOWELLS.

SIR, — Up to the date of the latest literary
intelligence from the West the Great American
Novel, so often announced with a triumphant
blare of trumpets from various centres of en-
lightenment throughout the Republic, and ever
postponed for certain mysterious, but, doubt-
less, satisfactory reasons — this promising and
much desiderated work, in which we are to
have a full and faithful presentation of the
heterogeneous elements of American life, from
Alaska to New Orleans, from Maine to Cali-
fornia, has not yet made its appearance. Until
it shall have been written, or, at any rate, until
it shall have been published, it would be
something of an exaggeration to style any
American writer truly national. In a literary
congress of the world America could accredit
no single individual to represent her. The

191

192 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

representation would have to be by districts, as
if Transatlantic authors could attain only to the
dignity of being parochial representatives, and
all owing to the delay in publishing that book.
Why is its publication so long deferred ? What
is wanting for a consummation so devoutly to
be wished as a full-length portrait of the fair and
spacious giantess, who on one side cools herself
in the surf of the Atlantic, and on the other suns
herself along the golden Pacific ? To outsiders,
like myself, not acquainted with matters of
internal policy, the question is pertinent and
interesting, and the failure of the authorities to
answer it might beget doubt of the ability of
Transatlantic writers to cope with the subject.
We frequently hear of the splendid oppor-
tunities of the American novelist. The fresh-
ness of his materials, we are told, the fluidity of
the social state, the sharp contrasts of manners
and complexions afford an artist a chance of
making a picture of unmatchable magnificence
and impressiveness ; but the picture itself has
not, so far as I am aware, yet reached these
shores. It would be idle to say that we have
any satisfactory likeness of the giant nation

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 193

lying within the boundaries of the United
States. Delightful Vignettes, indeed, we have
in plenty ; for the American artist, if not always,
so virile or robust as one could wish, is rarely
lacking in deftness. We have glimpses of the
Republic and her people, which are often
beautiful, and not infrequently suggestive and
stimulating. Mr. Lowell, with rare and con-
summate art, gives us that singular combination
of worldly shrewdness and moral fervour — rural
New England; Mr. Bret Harte, with almost
unmatched dramatic power, draws California in
her shirt sleeves, if I may be permitted to use
the expression — a pick in one hand and a pack
of cards in the other ; Louisiana has her laureate
in Mr. Cable, and Tennessee in Miss Murfree ;
Ole Virginia and Georgia have skilful and
sympathetic delineators in Mr. Stockton and
Mr. Joel Chandler Harris; while Boston, the
Hub of the Universe, as Dr. Holmes face-
tiously called it, has had ample attention at the
hands of Mr. Henry James and yourself. Thus
we have sketches in abundance ; but the
finished and organic picture, which should
fitly present the multitudinous and diverse
N

194 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

elements which constitute the national life we
have not. And why ? one is again tempted to
ask. Is it that the American novelist is abashed
by the dimensions of the subject? Beyond
question it is a large one, and one, moreover,
requiring no ordinary mental power, if it were
to be treated as it ought. Perhaps, indeed,
only a Shakespearian amplitude of intellect
were equal to its demands, for it embraces
not only America proper, but Europe, Asia,
and Africa as well. The great American
Novel when it does, in the course of the
centuries, arrive will be a phenomenal, an un-
paralleled book. I do not expect to have the
pleasure of perusing it. Nor, considering its
universal scope, am I altogether sorry; for
if writers have their limitations, so, also,
have readers; and too vast a book cannot
but prove a great weariness of both flesh and
spirit.

America, then, has hitherto produced no
writer who, in any strict sense, could be called
truly representative ; but this much, I think,
might truthfully be said, that, of all her writers,
none is more truly representative than yourself,

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 195

Not only have you depicted, with inimitable
grace and unmatched fulness, certain char-
acteristic features of American life, but you
show fewer traces of foreign influence — at least
of British influence — than any other American
writer I could at present name. While most of
your writing compatriots have been eager to
display their tincture of European culture (and
European culture in America generally means
English culture), you have stood manfully on
your instincts, and stuck to your plain Repub-
lic. In this, as I have said, you are almost
alone ; for a thin cosmopolitanism is at once
the ambition and the vice of American men of
letters. Even so sturdy a patriot as Mr. Lowell,
whose pen has so often and so eloquently
defended his country and poured a withering-
sarcasm on her enemies and detractors, has ex-
pressly stated that in literature, at least, America
must take example by England. You assert
the contrary, and not only assert it, but practise
it. Things of indigenous growth are good
enough for you. Boston, in your estimation,
may vie with Athens, and New York would
seem to have tastes infinitely superior to those

1 96 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

of London. Perhaps, aesthetically, Chicago is
above Edinburgh.

The English people are obviously little to
your mind. If we are to judge from your
books, you consider them always arrogant, and
often not a little insolent. Their conceit would
seem to be quite unmatchable, their modes of
thought to be antiquated, their views insular
and narrow, their novels mostly absurd, their
criticism entirely contemptible. When you
notice them, it is chiefly to contradict and
deride. When you want the weight of an
authoritative name, you do not choose from
their considerable list ; you pass them by con-
temptuously, and give your patronage to France,
or Italy, or Russia. You so far bow to tradi-
tion, indeed, as to speak with approval of
Shakespeare; you even borrow from him on
occasion, as witness some of your titles ; but as
a rule, when you are in the mood to admire,
you give British authors a wide berth, and
British critics a still wider one.

It were of course vain to quarrel with you for
all this. I trust I am as good a patriot as my
neighbours, and should as little like to see my

MA\ WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. 197

country menaced or my countrymen maligned,
but candour must admit that there is a measure,
a considerable measure, of truth in many of
your strictures on questions affecting English
literature and English taste. I think it was
Emerson who said that a man of character
likes to be told of his faults ; and I am sure
that the English nation, as a whole, has char-
acter enough to receive your reproofs in a
spirit profitable for edification, and not only
that, but to admire your unswerving pertinacity
and your sturdy independence. On matters of
taste, it is perfectly clear that no oracle can be
final and conclusive ; and it is not to be ex-
pected that the British people will cast aside
the convictions which come of the accumulated
experience of centuries of high and earnest
endeavour to embrace doctrines which, however
admirable in their way, and however potent for
good in some communities, would often have
little to recommend them here, except their
novelty. The people of these Islands are, by
temperament and tradition, conservative. They
have a dread of what they style new-fangled
notions, a dread so keen that they often reject

1 98 LE TTERS 70 LI VI NG A UTHORS

valuable counsel, for no more logical reason
than because it recommends innovations. This
is a failing which really arises from a virtue.
Conscious of a past which, in many respects,
transcends in glory all that is recorded of the
nations of antiquity, they feel with uncommon
acuteness the weight of responsibility resting
upon them. Their temper is to conserve at any
cost of sacrifice what has been gathered and
built up by a brave and noble ancestry ; hence
they are too often blind to the opportunities
and possibilities of the present. Like house-
holders who have amassed a competency, they
are timid in experimenting, lest experiment
should endanger their possessions.

There can be no doubt whatever that Eng-
land has much to learn from America, not only
in those manual and mechanical arts in which
we are usually willing to acknowledge our own
inferiority, but in the higher spheres of intel-
lectual activity, in which we are not so ready to
own any real rivalry. And in this respect the
strictures of a perspicacious critic like yourself
are invaluable. Let it be frankly admitted that
we are children of Adam, and have our short-

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 199

comings ; that England is not the world, far
less the universe ; that our tastes are occasion-
ally peculiar, and not always pre-eminently
intelligent ; that our books are not immeasur-
ably superior to the books of all other nations ;
that our criticism would be none the worse of a
trifle more breadth at times ; in a word, that
we English are a fallible race, with serious
limitations, and not a few robust prejudices ;
and that we have not always shown that open-
ness and generosity of mind in respect of the
efforts and admonitions of Cousin Jonathan
that would perhaps be becoming ; let all this
be owned, and promises of amendment made.

On the other hand, it is possible that America,
if she were inclined that way, might learn some-
thing from England. The mother-country is
the older, and has the greater capital of expe-
rience ; moreover, her intellectual achievements
are in reality more considerable than those of
even her most stalwart daughter. Might it not
be well to bear this in mind while animadverting
on her performances ? To the general reader
it is very entertaining to find critics, on either
side of the Atlantic, indulging in caustic re-

200 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

criminations ; but the judicious cannot but
regret the presence of so acrimonious a spirit
in international compliments. The Anglo-
Saxon race should have other aims than to show
its ingenuity in the elaboration of petty differ-
ences. Both England and America have so
many good points, so many points in common,
and they are both so strong, that they ought
not to indulge in small squabbles. A spirit of
chivalry is becoming in the high and powerful.
I have dwelt on this point at some length,
because I think it of more importance than is
generally conceived. Literature is so subtle,
it is necessarily so pervasive of all our best
thinking in every direction, that any infection,
which is likely to prove generally injurious,
should be especially guarded against. Besides,
if you will pardon me for saying so, it is not for
artists of your standing and talent to descend
to the demeaning trade of the John Dennises.
Healthy, hearty indignation is a thing to be
admired, but the spirit of carping is an evil
spirit, and to be avoided. Your skill is best
exhibited in giving us such delicately-drawn
characters as Lydia Blood and Egeria Boynton,

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HOIVELLS. 201

Constance Wyatt and Isabel March. Give us
a little more of that feminine world, in deline-
ating which you have hardly a living rival, and
leave fault-finding to those whom Nature in-
tended for the business.

Mr. Henry James has said somewhere that it
is something for a novelist to have a plan, a
theory. Assuredly it is, but it is a great deal
more to give it artistic embodiment. It is not
every writer who makes precept and practice
agree. Now whatever adverse critics might say
of you, and they have said a good many things,
they could hardly call you inconsistent. Your
theories of life and art may be open to objec-
tion ; it might be said they lack breadth, but
no one could say that you preach one thing
and practise another. You have very distinct
ideas of what you wish to do, and you have the
power, the rare and enviable power, of carrying
out your conceptions. You have your limita-
tions, perhaps they could easily be shown ; but
as far as you go, you seem to me to have as
easy a mastery over your materials as any of
your contemporary novelists. Your ideals may
not, in the eyes of some, be particularly lofty ;

202 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

but, so far as a reader can judge, you carry
them out to the utmost. This gift of perfect
expression is rare, — in reality, perhaps, the rarest
in literature. Only a very few writers of all the
ages give one the impression of being able,
through literary mediums, to express precisely
what they wish. Shakespeare has this power —
as he has most powers of which man has any
cognisance — so has John Bunyan, so has De-
foe ; and so, in our own time, have two very
different men, Cardinal Newman and Mr,
Lowell. The power, as I have said, is yours
also. I do not know, I cannot imagine, how
you would deal with the heroic. It is probable
your keen critical sense and your intimate self-
knowledge would keep you from attempting
what Nature had not fitted you for. At any
rate you have essayed nothing hitherto which
you have not accomplished easily and well ;
so that if we might occasionally quarrel with
your ambition, it would be unjust to impugn
your power.

Your first characteristic, then, is clear-sighted-
ness (the root, one would say, of most excel-
lences which a writer can possess), and this is

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 203

shown equally in your criticisms and your
creations. It emphasises your merits and marks
your limitations. Your comments on the Italian
poets, for example, are as shrewd and keen as
your analysis of the character of Professor
Owen, or Silas Lapham • of Grace Breen, or
Kitty Ellison. And in your criticism and
your analysis alike, your compass is limited.
In many ways you are a most peculiar writer.
You see into your subject with uncommon
clearness for a certain distance, but you come,
all at once, as it were, to a blank wall, which
completely shuts off the view, and cannot be
scaled. I do not think your work gives much
evidence of intuition. You yourself would deny
that it gives any. And, certainly, what you do
not actually see you seem unable to divine.
And this, as I have said, is at once your excel-
lence and your defect. As there is nothing
vague in your writings, so there is not much
that is majestic. Grandeur is not in your line.
Your novels have been called the incarnation
of the commonplace. In another sense than
the critic intended, their highest merit is that
they are truly and truthfully commonplace, that

204 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

they depict the world as we see it about us, and
depict it with exact and courageous fidelity.
What we call impressiveness is, in most authors,
oftener owing to defect than to perfection of
vision. Dante, .to be sure, can be impressive
and minute— he is the greatest of all realists,
but Milton to be impressive must be vague ;
and it is with the majority of writers as with
Milton. We are impressed by Coleridge, by
Richter, and sometimes by Hawthorne, without
knowing precisely how or why; and we are
convinced they could not themselves reveal the
secret of their impressiveness. Thus much is
imposing, simply because it is vague. Now
you never have the advantage of dimness or
gloom. Your characters are always in the full
glare of the light. So soon as they pass out of
the sunlight, they pass out of the reader's ken.
They do not hover for an indefinite period in
the twilight, duskily seen in the falling darkness,
increasing in dimension in proportion as they
diminish in distinctness. With you there is no
duskiness, no debatable land. It is either white
light or complete darkness. Hence, so far as it
goes, everything is definite and unmistakable.

MR. WILLIAM DEAN HO WELLS. 205

But, oddly enough, this very definiteness has
given the impression that you are a superficial
observer of your fellow-men, whereas the fact
is there are few keener, few who see or feel
with so much certainty within certain limits.
Your creations, if they are seldom romantic and
never heroic, are always intensely human. They
may be commonplace characters (by common-
place, I presume, is meant people, such as we
ordinarily meet in real life), but they are beyond
all cavil creatures of flesh and blood, with the
same ambitions, the same impulses, and pretty
much the same foibles as ourselves. There is
hardly one of them whom we do not come to
know as thoroughly as we usually know our
acquaintances in the world. Your women are
especially admirable. I do not remember a
single dim or ineffectual portrait in all your
female gallery. Isabel March, Florida Vervain,
Lydia Blood, and the rest of them are capitally
drawn. All your grace, subtlety, and delicacy
come out in your women, for you seem to be
complete master of the variable feminine nature.
I do not know that ladies have always cause to
be grateful to you. You do not flatter them

206 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

any more than does Mr. Hardy, but surely you
do not libel them. At all events your portraits
marvellously resemble many originals to be met
daily in the world about us.

The delicacy which finds its fittest expression
in the delineation of feminine character is also
seen in your style. I have seen you censured
for being fastidious and far-fetched in your
literary expression. Even if the charge were
just, it is surely better to be elegant and clean
than slovenly and coarse as so many of our
novelists are. But I do not think the indict-
ment will hold. In speaking of your style, I
think original would be a much more appro-
priate epithet than far-fetched ; and no one
with an eye or an ear for such things can deny
that your writing is graceful and musical almost
beyond example in the present day.

WILLIAM BLACK.

To MR. WILLIAM BLACK.

SIR, — I sometimes try to imagine what the
aspect of our English literature of the nine-
teenth century would be with the works of
Scottish authors left out. I fancy the extent of
the breach would astonish most people, as-
suredly it would astonish such as are in the
habit of vaguely relegating intellect to the
southern half of the kingdom. In poetry, in-
deed, the loss would be trivial if every line
written by Scotsmen during the past ninety
years were expunged ; for even Campbell and
Scott do not stand in the first rank of poets,
nor very high in the second, while the hordes
of Wilsons and Aytouns and Tennants are
scarcely to be reckoned as making any sensible
contribution to the array of thought which con-
stitutes our national British literature.

In criticism, history, and biography Auld
Scotia does better ; for in these departments

207

208 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

will be found the mighty names of Carlyle,
Jeffrey, and Macaulay ; but it is in fiction she
does best, since in it she leads the nations.

One often wonders how the world could ever
get along without the novels of Scott. How
did the readers of the ages preceding his birth
do without them ? — without The Bride of Lam-
mermoor, Old Mortality^ The Antiquary —
which so good a judge as Mr. Wilkie Collins
considers the best novel ever written — and all
the others left us by the same creative hand ?
To be sure, there were novelists before Scott.
There was Fielding, brilliant, penetrative, humor-
ous, virile, original, daring, often coarse, and
sometimes positively indecent, it is true ; yet,
with all his faults, a writer to be proud of in
even an Augustan age, and who has his admirers
after the Wizard of the North has performed
his wonders, and the author of Kidnapped pro-
nounced Tom Jones dull. And there was
Smollet, just a little less in stature than Field-
ing, stained too, but vigorous and entertaining ;
and Defoe, with his immortal Crusoe ; and the
solemn and sentimental Mr. Samuel Richard-
son ; and Sterne, the finest humorist in all our

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 209

literature, except Burns ; and Goldsmith, lead-
ing his gentle Vicar, whose passage from the
blue room to the green is as interesting as most
people's voyage round the globe ; and the sub-
lime Mrs. Radcliffe with her Mysteries of Udol-
pho ; and the great and gloomy Swift with
his Gulliver, which still, perhaps, stands un-
rivalled for directness and force. But with all
these one is again constrained to ask how
our great-great-grandfathers and their elegant
spouses got along without the novels of Scott,
and how we should get along without them ?
Carlyle asked quite seriously whether we would
not rather part with our Indian Empire than
with our Shakespeare ; and, if the choice had
to be made, I dare say we should rather give up
any considerable piece of territory than our
Walter Scott.

That the greatest of all novelists should have
been a Scotsman, and that Scotsmen still take
the lead in fiction, is a matter of no little pride
to the people of Scotland, and of no little inte-
rest to folks at large. The national character
of the Scottish people is not popularly thought

to be such as would tend to give them pre-
O

210 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

eminence in that engaging art of lying, the
decadence of which Mr. Oscar Wilde recently
lamented. No doubt there are ' grand leears '
among the Scotch as among other enlightened
peoples ; but, as a whole, they are thought to
be rather sternly and solemnly veracious, paying
far more heed to hard fact, particularly when it
takes the form of hard cash, than to flowers of
fancy, however beautiful, or to creations of the
imagination, however sublime. They are not
romantic, but oppressively matter-of-fact ; in
fact, they are the last people in the world whom
we should suspect of sitting down to write ' idle
and profane stories.' Yet, prosaic as they are,
they are giving us the bulk of our best imagi-
native prose.

As you are one of the most popular of
novelists now living, so, also, you are one of
the best. You have, in my opinion, given us
more interesting stories and finer studies of
Scottish character than any other writer since
the days of Scott, though Mrs. Oliphant's pic-
tures of Scottish life are invariably excellent.
But I think Mrs. Oliphant scarcely does herself
justice. I fear she writes too much. The

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 211

mass of literature she has produced is so
stupendous that one is forced to sum up its
merits as Macaulay did the work of Dr. Nares
on Burleigh and his Times, by saying that it
consists of so many thousand printed pages,
that it occupies so many hundred inches, cubic
measure,- and that it weighs so many pounds
avoirdupois. To be sure, Mrs. Oliphant in-
variably turns out good work. She does not
scamp ; but then she rarely concentrates herself
upon any supreme effort. She is in such
a hurry that she hardly takes time to fuse
her characters in her mind, so that, while
one would not hesitate to pronounce them
well-drawn, there is still something hard and
undeveloped about them ; and it is only by
flashes and hints that we discern the real power
of the writer, or what she might accomplish if
she were less determinedly energetic. You
have been truer to yourself. It would perhaps
be impossible for a popular author to practise
the reticence which alone ensures continuous
artistic excellence, and I will not say you have
not been guilty of over-production ; but, on the
other hand, you have more than once bent all

212 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

your faculties on a single book, and so done
yourself and your readers justice. A Daughter
of Heth, for instance, shows the artist master of
his art. Mr. Shorthouse, indeed, places it in
the very first rank of works of fiction, and says,
' It not only fulfils the requirements of the
human spirit, but stands the more difficult test
of being perfect as a whole.'

That is high praise, but it is not undeserved.
The book grows naturally and organically, the
characters are consistent and clearly drawn,
there are both humour and pathos, and the
descriptions are compact and graphic. A
Princess of Thule, too, is a work of real art ; so,
likewise, is Madeod of Dare, notwithstanding
its unhappy ending. By the way, does it mar
the artistic merits of a book to end unhappily,
supposing such ending is logical and consistent ?
I have heard readers express themselves as
being delighted with all but the end of
Macleod of Dare. What would they have ?
Did they expect you to trample on logic, and
thwart destiny by bringing your hero out pink
and smiling ? Truly, there are some most un-
reasonable people in this world. The end of

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 213

Macleod of Dare is the best piece of work you
have ever done — nay, more, it is one of the best
pieces of work done by any novelist, living or
dead. There is inspiration in it, and I dare say
you could not have averted the terrible fate of
the hero if you would. And why should you
if you could ? Does life always, or even invari-
ably, end in blissful sunshine? If not, then
why should novels, which are supposed to be
transcripts of life ?

* Ah, but it is so very distressing to witness
those catastrophes of unhappy endings,' says
the languid creature, who wishes to be amused.
Doubtless, but since Adam sinned, if we want
to look on truth we must look on suffering.
Had Eve not partaken of that unlucky apple,
then all might have been different. In an ideal
state, all novels should have happy endings, if,
indeed, in the ideal state, people would care for
anything so trivial as fiction. Other states —
other tastes and amusements. Perhaps reality
would have a greater attraction then.

But, indeed, this outcry against unhappy end-
ings is inexpressibly silly ; and it is well that a
writer should occasionally please himself by

214 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

taking his own way. If it be the right thing to
do, let him hang, drown, or shoot his hero,
regardless of censure. A man who is born for
misery and a violent death has clearly no right
to happiness and a peaceful exit. Nor should
a heroine, born under an adverse star, be
allowed to hug a husband or fondle a baby.
These things are- for the fortunate only. At
the same time, when Fate is propitious, it were
folly to thwart her. Weddings, after all, are, as
the young lady observed, 'very nice things
indeed, and there can hardly be too many of
them.'

Your forte is the delineation of Highland
character, which you understand well. Your
Highlanders always bear the stamp of reality.
One may meet them in the North any day. It
has been my lot to mingle with Highlanders
pretty frequently, and I must, in justice, say
that you draw the Scottish Celt as he has not
been drawn by any other living writer whatso-
ever. Nor do you depend for your interest on
the exceptional and abnormal. Your High-
landers are not Rob Roys and Alan Breck
Stewarts. That breed, thank heaven, is extinct,

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 215

and in its place has grown up a class infinitely
more heroic if less spectacular, though Southern
critics do not always seem to be aware of the
fact. It would be amusing, were it not so pain-
ful, to note the opinions which are still preval-
ent south of the Tweed regarding the people of
the far North. Notwithstanding the facilities
of travel, and the revolution which those facili-
ties have worked in almost every department of
knowledge, there is still a deplorable ignorance
of the Highland character in enlightened Eng-
land. This is not because Englishmen do not
visit the northern half of Scotland, but because
they are too lofty and precipitate in their
methods of judging. The Highlanders are not
to be understood in a day, nor in a week, nor
even in a year. They are proud, shy, and
sensitive, and do not readily reveal themselves
to strangers, particularly to strangers who affect
airs of superiority. A haughtier people than
the Highlanders does not exist, and never
did exist. Hospitable as are the Scottish Celts,
a word or look is often enough to make them
coil up within themselves like hedgehogs, and
show only bristles that will prick if touched.

216 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Above all, they cannot endure to be patronised ;
so that, when glib literary tourists of the Joseph
and Elizabeth Pennell species go north to air
their conceit, their prepossessions, and their
immeasurable ignorance, the poor Highlander,
having some self-respect, keeps to himself, pre-
ferring even misrepresentation to the dire
calamity of familiarity with such a' set. The
rubbish that has been printed about the High-
lands and the Highlanders passes the bounds
of imagination. There is something sublime in
the easy audacity with which peripatetic critics,
from the days of Samuel Johnson and Jamie
Boswell down, pronounce judgment on the un-
fortunate inhabitants of the Highlands.

Had you done nothing else than write A
Princess of Thule and Macleod of Dare you
would have deserved well of your generation
for courageously using your eyes and speaking
the truth respecting a people that has been
most cruelly misunderstood and misrepresented.
The name of William Black rouses enthu-
siasm in the north and west of Scotland.
The people there think that he at least under-
stands and loves them ; and they are right, for

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 217

he does both. Have you flattered them ?
Surely not. You have simply painted them as
they are, thereby once more proving that ' there
is nothing good or beautiful outside of what is
true, nothing noble or sacred outside of what is
natural.'

Into the question whether your work is in-
trinsically great, it were perhaps idle to enter,
seeing the world is so very uncertain in its own
mind respecting what constitutes real greatness.
You have truth and naturalness, and no incon-
siderable poetic power, and many would say
that these are in themselves the essence of great-
ness. But you remember what Carlyle says of
the first of all novelists. ' Friends to precision
of epithet,' says the Sage of Chelsea, ' will pro-
bably deny his title to the name "great." It
seems to us there goes other stuff to the making
of great men than can be detected here. One
knows not what idea worthy of the name of great,
what purpose, instinct, or tendency, that could
be called great Scott ever was inspired with.
. . . There is nothing spiritual in him. . . .
Winged words were not his vocation ; nothing
urged him that way ; the great Mystery of

218 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

Existence was not great to him, did not drive
him into rocky solitudes to wrestle with it for
an answer to be answered or to perish. He
had nothing of the martyr ; into no dark region
to slay monsters for us did he, either led or
driven, venture down; his conquests were for
his own behoof mainly, conquests over common
market labour, and reckonable in good metallic
coin of the realm. . . . Shall we call this great ?
It seems to us there dwells and struggles another
sort of spirit in the inward parts of great men.'

This is not the standard by which we judge
our authors nowadays. Shall we apply it to
you ? Shall we inquire what dark regions you
have wrestled in, and what spiritual victories
you have gained? Shall we inquire whether
you have grown lean like Dante or Mahomet
in your spiritual fights ? or cast your inkstand
at the devil like Martin Luther? Shall we
throw your characters on the dissecting-table,
and see whether there be any Othellos, or
Hamlets, or Mignons among them? In a
word, shall we, in strictest scientific method,
proceed to probe and weigh you to ascertain
whether in the old high sense you are a great

MR. WILLIAM BLACK. 219

man ? The practice is really out of date.
Time was when the transcendental philosopher
Fichte might truthfully describe the man of
letters as a priest interpreting, or endeavouring
to interpret, Heaven's message to man. But
that day has gone by. The world has changed,
marched forward, as some think, and the man
of letters has now other aims. Literature has
become a profession, and is followed like any
other, not for the purpose of ' revealing the
God-like to man,' but for most part as the
readiest means of securing a share of that good
metallic coin of the realm of which Mr. Carlyle
speaks so contemptuously. You do not con-
cern yourself with the slaying of monsters.
Readers will find few spiritual wrestlings in
your novels, a fact for which on the whole they
ought humbly to thank Heaven. Our spiritual
and religious needs are being so well looked
after by novelists, from Count Tolstoi to Mrs.
Ward, that it is really something of a relief — a
wicked pleasure some might call it — to read a
novel in which the hero does not go through
the agonies of religious doubt and despair, and
in which the heroine is not made miserable by

220 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

doctrines she does not understand. After all,
foolish, erring, warm-blooded, passionate human
nature is better than the dolorous things that
issue, from time to time, from the shadows of
our theological seminaries to wring the hands,
to wail and tear the hair in public, as if their
chiefest function were to exhibit their skill and
ingenuity in making themselves wretched. The
novelist's first concern, one would say, should
be with humanity pure and simple. When
human nature has been exhausted he might
have a turn at theology, but in the meantime
the majority of readers would be better pleased
by his sticking to that desperately wicked and
deceitful thing the heart. That you have gener-
ally been content with it is at once the ground
of your excellence and the cause of your popu-
larity.

ROBKRT BUCHANAN.

To MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN.

SIR, — You are perhaps the best existing type
of the militant man of letters. Certainly none
is readier to fight, none less awed by the quality
of an opponent. You are not daunted by great
names, nor restrained by considerations of
policy. You donned your armour and fur-
bished your blade as readily and joyously to
meet the late Mr. Matthew Arnold as you now
assume the fighting gear to meet Mr. Andrew
Lang, or Mr. George Moore, or Mr. Edmund
Yates, or Mr. Labouchere. The challenge
never comes to you in vain ; nor are you to be
disturbed with impunity. The thistle might
well be engraven on your shield, and ' Ready,
aye ready ' would not be an inappropriate motto.
Like the bold Macpherson, your literary life has
been one of ' sturt and strife.' From that early
assault on ( The Fleshly School of Poetry ' to the

recent bombardment of ' Imperial Cockneydom,'

221

222 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

you have encountered many a doughty warrior,
and dealt many a weighty and valorous blow.
And the spirit of the fray is still strong upon
you. To-day, as in times past, you present
yourself with girded loins and an undiminished
ardour for battle. I suppose there are times
when you would really prefer not to fight, but
the public knows nothing of you in such
moments of weakness. So far as you are known
to your readers, the arms are always in order,
and the spirit ever eager.

I am disposed to think that it is not love of
fighting for its own sake that leads you to un-
sheathe your sword so frequently, but a love of
truth, a love of fair-play, a love of purity and good-
ness, a love of high principles and your fellow-
men. You are not simply a polemic ; though,
once you are in the arena, you are as hot and stub-
born a controversialist as the late Charles Reade
himself. You do not seem, to me, to take up
arms for the pleasure of destroying, or the glory
of jumping on weak opponents. And certainly
you do not take them up with an eye to your own
profit. It is not by ' telling the truth and sham-
ing the deil,' as the Scottish proverb has it, that

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 223

men gather in the shekels. Though it is pain-
ful to be compelled to make the admission,
rather the contrary is the case. ' If a man
would fill his granaries and attain to the sub-
lime heights of worldly prosperity,' says a quaint
old moralist, 'three things he must earnestly
pray to be delivered from. He must petition,
first, that he be not stirred up to a vehement
insistence on disagreeable truths ; what men
profess to be deaf to let him be silent on :
second, that he be not tempted to cross the
vanity or self-love of his fellows ; for thereby
ensueth bitterness and strife which do mightily
hinder a man : third, that he be endowed with
the supple properties of the willow, which
bendeth gracefully before the blast; for as-
suredly it cometh to pass that the man like the
tree that bendeth not shall be levelled by the
hurricane. The Gallic proverb, that there is
nothing beautiful but truth, containeth a griev-
ous heresy. Verily it is my opinion that this
same wench who is called truth hath been the
ruin of many a right excellent man.' While
taking exception to some of the moralist's senti-
ments, there can be no question that the policy

224 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

he inculcates is full of worldly wisdom. None
knows better than you how extremely detri-
mental it is to all one's worldly interest, in this
languid and euphuistic age, to call a spade a
spade and a quack a quack. You have recently
told us that at one period of your career it be-
came inexpedient to publish your works under
your own name, because on some question or
other, affecting the weal of the republic of
letters, you spoke your mind in forcible Saxon
language. Yet this knowledge, — the knowledge
that plain speech is inimical to a man's financial
interests — does not now deter you from saying
all you wish to say, and saying it in words as
plain as those of Swift himself; so that I might
appropriately apply to you the lines of Burns to
Charles James Fox —

1 My much-honour'd patron, believe your poor poet,
Your courage much more than your prudence you
show it. '

And, indeed, one never thinks of your deeds
without being struck with your colossal courage.
You, more markedly than most, possess that
' perfect will which no terrors can shake, which
is attracted by frowns, or threats, or hostile

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 225

armies ; nay, needs these to awake and fan its
reserved energies into a pure flame, and is never
quite itself until the hazard is extreme.' We
may call you impetuous and impolitic, but we
dare not deny your courage. You shoot your
shafts straight at the mark, and not at some
substituted simulacrum, some shade or dim
adumbration set up as a decoy to deceive the
public. When your dander is up, as Dandie
Dinmont would say, none may approach you
too closely. As Mr. Lowell said of a certain
countryman of yours, when you are in the
storm and tumult of battle, you are like a three-
decker on fire — dangerous alike to friend and
foe. Yet no one is readier to own an error or
make amends for a wrong. It is not given to
every man to be generous as well as just. I
believe they are comparatively few who could
address such lines as these to an old enemy —

' I would have snatched a bay-leaf from thy brow,

Wronging the chaplet on an honoured head ;
In peace and charity I bring thee now

A lily flower instead.

Pure as thy purpose, blameless as thy song,
Sweet as thy spirit may this offering be ;
Forget the bitter blame that did thee wrong,
And take the gift from me. '

226 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

This is, I dare say, as characteristic as any-
thing you have written, and made as great a
demand on courage as any conflict in which
you ever engaged.

Moreover, it is evidence that you have
learned the greatest lesson which destiny has
to teach — that of being true to one's-self — in
other words, the necessity of overcoming all
fear — fear to acknowledge a fault as well as fear
to storm a stronghold. 'He has not learned
the lesson of life,' says one whose silver pen
you have yourself extolled, 'who does not
every day surmount a fear. . . . Have the cour-
age not to adopt another's courage. There is
scope, and cause, and resistance enough for us
in our proper work and circumstance. And
there is no creed of an honest man, be he
Christian, Turk, or Gentoo, which does not
equally preach it. If you have no faith in bene-
ficent power above you, but see only an adaman-
tine fate coiling its folds about nature and man,
then reflect that the best use of fate is to teach us
courage, if only because baseness cannot change
the appointed event. If you accept your
thoughts as inspirations from the Supreme

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 227

Intelligence, obey them when they prescribe
difficult duties, because they come only so long
as they are used ; or if your scepticism reaches
to the last verge, and you have no confidence
in any foreign mind, then be brave, because
there is one good opinion which must always
be of consequence to you — namely, your own.'
I do not think it will be denied by any one who
has watched your career and studied your writ-
ings, that your opinions are most distinctly your
own. You do not belong to the flaccid class
that eternally assents ; you are not one of those
who live in perpetual fear of giving offence ; nor
will it be gainsaid that whatever difficult duties
your conscience prescribes, you perform to the
uttermost of your ability.

We may admire your courage, however, with-
out at all concurring in your opinions. Indeed,
we will admire the more because of a differ-
ence of sentiment. And for myself let me say
frankly that from many of your judgments I
entirely dissent. Your opinion of Goethe,
for example, seems to me altogether unworthy
of your perspicacity as a critic, and your
liberality as a thinker. Your estimates of

228 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

George Eliot and Matthew Arnold, too, seem
to me curiously unjust. When you call George
Eliot a 'pragmatic rectangular prosaist,' and
speak of the ' preposterous ' career of the author
of Faust, and aver that he really never lived,
one is inclined to think that, like David when
he slandered all mankind, you spoke in very
inconsiderate haste. I for one see -nothing pre-
posterous in the career of Goethe, and I think
that George Eliot, far from being a prosaist, is,
except in occasional lapses, a truly creative
artist. But you seem to me most unjust in
denying the title of poet to Matthew Arnold.
I believe with Mr. Hall Caine that there is
poetry in the ' Strayed Reveller ' and ' Dover
Beach,' and I find 'The Youth of Nature'
touching and true. The lines —

' Race after race, man after man,
Have thought that my secret was theirs,
Have dreamed that I lived but for them,
That they were my glory and joy.
They are dust, they are changed, they are gone !
I remain,'

seem to me to give out the right tone. But I
am more concerned with you as an artist than
as a critic.

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 229

You have been a busy worker in the realm
of imagination, and, to my mind, a successful
worker. You have written too much to be
always at your best, but your worst is never
bad. You have not had, or you have not taken,
the leisure to excise, polish, and amend your
productions, as among present-day poets Lord
Tennyson and Mr. Lowell have done, or among
past poets Pope and Gray. But you are always
a poet, and invariably an artist. Many of your
poems are exquisite in form, and nearly all of
them attest beyond a peradventure that even
at the close of the nineteenth century the spirit
of poetry is still in our midst. No one can
read Balder the Beautiful, or The Book of
Orm, or The City of Dream, without being
convinced (if he have an eye and ear for such
things) that he is reading the work of a true
poet. Nor is your prose less true or less im-
portant than your poetry.

As a novelist you work with a purpose. You
descend, as you say yourself, to the heresy of
instruction. Many eminent critics do hold it a
heresy to descend to instruction in works of
fiction, and many great authors are with the

230 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

critics. Goethe (whom you will permit me to
call great), for instance, says in reference to his
own Werther, in that autobiography which
every student of literature should read, ' It
cannot be expected that the public should re-
ceive an intellectual work intellectually. In
fact, it was only the subject, the material part,
that was considered, as I had already found to
be the case among my own friends, while at the
same time arose that old prejudice, associated
with the dignity of a printed book — that it
ought to have a moral aim. But a true picture
of life has none. It neither approves nor cen-
sures, but develops sentiments and actions in
their consequences, and thereby enlightens and
instructs.' These are Goethe's sentiments on
the subject. He did not believe in the novel
with a purpose ; nor did Scott consider himself
under any necessity to be didactic. Shake-
speare, likewise, was careless of his oppor-
tunities to play the role of schoolmaster, and it
is my candid opinion that Homer never really
concerned himself about the moral and social
welfare of his auditors.

However, the English people, though paying

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 231

little heed, as a rule, to moral instruction, like
nothing better as an amusement ; and there is
no valid reason for not gratifying their tastes.
Moreover, it pays to have a purpose when the
purpose is not flaunted too officiously in the
reader's face. Dickens, in various sweet pre-
parations, gave his readers heavy doses of
' doctrines of reform,' and they clapped their
hands and shouted for joy. Mr. Besant, too,
has followed in the footsteps of the author
of David Copperfield^ with very gratifying suc-
cess, and Mrs. Ward has enjoyed quite a
' boom ' as a teacher and reformer. You
have, therefore, precedent and example enough
in writing romance with a purpose. And let it
be granted without demur that in your case the
process of indoctrination has been accomplished
with a skill and an eloquence that give your
novels a high place in the best class of didactic
fiction. The Shadow of the Sword is, per-
haps, the most powerful polemic against public
war that has ever been written ; more powerful
than all the orations of all the orators from
Demosthenes to John Bright. Nor is it less
admirable as a work of art than as a protest

232 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

against the most heinous, because the most
cruel and least excusable, crime that darkens
the annals of mankind. The characters and
situations alike are strong and telling, and abide
in one's memory. In another way your Mar-
tyrdom of Madeline is almost as good. But
I think it is in God and the Man that you
touch high-water mark. That is a powerful, a
terrible, a fascinating book. You call it ' a
study of the vanity and folly of individual Hate,'
and surely never before in romance was the folly
of individual hate more eloquently and fearfully
made manifest. Never before did human being
pursue an enemy more fiercely and relentlessly
than Christian Christiansen, or find revenge so
bitter. The character of Christian is titanic —
titanic in its ferocity, its tenacity, and its ulti-
mate nobleness. Nothing could be more
savage than his appetite for vengeance, nothing
more disappointing than the dead-sea fruit to
which that vengeance turns in the moment of
expected triumph, nothing more touching than
the final sorrow and humility of the stricken
soul. Like a demon he prays and blasphemes
at the beginning —

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 233

' Yield up to me

This man alone of all men that I see !
Give him to me and to misery !
Give me this man if a God thou be.

But the cruel heavens all open lie,
No God doth reign o'er the sea and sky,
The earth is dark and the clouds go by,
But there is no God to hear me cry.

There is no God, none, to abolish one

Of the foul things thought, and dreamed, and done !

Wherefore I hate, till my race is run,

All living men beneath the sun.

O Lord my God, if a God there be,
Give up the man I hate to me !
On his living heart let my vengeance feed,
And I shall know Thou art God indeed.

The night is still, the waters sleep, the skies
Gaze down with bright innumerable eyes ;
A voice comes out of heaven and o'er the sea :
" I am ; and I will give this man to thee." '

And with the bloodthirstiness of a sleuth-
hound he tracks his prey from point to point,
oh land, on sea, in green England, and amid
the snows and ice of the Polar regions, till at
last he has him fast ; and then — then ven-
geance swift and terrible — ah ! no, only a tem-
porary madness, a momentary exultation, a

234 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

spasm of cruel delight in the misfortunes of
Richard Orchardson, and then God smites the
heart of the would-be murderer, till it melts
and gushes like the hard rock in Horeb. His
behaviour, when Richard Orchardson lies dying
before him, is piety itself. * When I knew that
he was dead indeed, I bent over him reverently,
placed his arms down by his side, and seeing
his eyes wide open, drew down the waxen lids
over the sightless orbs. Then I held a little
water in the palm of my hand, and cleansed the
dead face ; afterwards with careful fingers ar-
ranging his hair and beard. Lastly I took one
of my rude lights and set it at the corpse's
head, like the death-lights we burn round dead
folks in the Fens. . . . When I had ordered all
in Christian cleanliness and reverence, I sat
and gazed upon mine enemy. . . . Then one
still morn, when the air was bright for the
place and time of year, I lifted him in my arms
and carried him slowly forth across the snow.
I had the rude grave all ready, and now I laid
him down within it, with his white face to the
sky. As I stood above him, and took my last
look of him, more snow began to fall. . . .

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN. 235

Then standing bareheaded, eager still to keep
my pledge to him, I repeated, as far as I could
remember, the words of the old sweet Burial
Service out of our English Book of Prayer ; and
when I could remember no more, I stretched
out my arms in blessing, commending my
enemy's soul to God. Before I had ended, his
face had faded away in the falling whiteness ;
and seeing it vanish utterly, I sobbed like a
little child.' And so Christian Christianson
has his revenge, pouring out his heart in sorrow.
The other characters are almost equally well
drawn, and there are throughout the book
many delightful bits of description, and situa-
tions that thrill one to the marrow ; but over
these I may not now linger. Sufficient to say
that so long as we have writers writing books
like God and the Man, there is still hope for
the literature of our country.

To MR. R. D. BLACKMORE.

SIR, — Not many authors are regarded as
classics in their own lifetime, and have their
works read and treated with the admiration and
reverential affection which are thought to be
the meed of the great dead alone. The public
seem to have an idea that Spartan treatment is
best for existing writers, that their growth will
be sturdier and healthier on short rations and
some buffeting than on much pudding and
great praise. It is all very well to honour the
dead with monuments and eulogistic epitaphs,
but the living should not be spoiled by being
led to think too much of themselves. To be
sure there are instances to prove that the public
sometimes exercise a spirit of indulgence to-
wards living authors. Sir Walter Scott had a
foretaste of the honours of immortality, while
he was yet the 'Shirra,' notwithstanding the
chivalrous cry, as Mr. Lang calls it, of ' Burke

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 237

Sir Walter,' which, ringing and echoing in the
dying man's ears, really affrighted and embit-
tered his last moments. Coleridge and Carlyle,
likewise, while still in the flesh, were allowed
to possess something of the power and potency
of them ' who rule our spirits from their urns,'
and our Poet Laureate, while happily still en-
riching our literature, has more of the homage
and veneration of men than most writers who
have gone to that bourne whence there is no
return.

But all these cases are exceptional. Post-
humous honours are seldom tendered to living
authors ; seldomer to novelists than to any ; for
the common novel being hardly less ephemeral
than the common newspaper, the presumption
is all against the fitness of a writer of fiction for
even a lower seat in the Valhalla of the gods.
But it will' hardly be deemed invidious, as it
will certainly be no flattery, to say that the
author of Lorna Doone is as sure of his niche
in the great Temple, as any writer on the
long and honourable roll of British fiction.
You still write, the critics still concern them-
selves with your productions, but to readers at

238 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

large you have passed beyond the narrow con-
fines of criticism, and taken your place in the
hearts of the people. I am not quite certain
that harsh criticism of your writings would be
tolerated. The Englishman is a dangerous
animal when one attempts to interfere with one
of his favourites, far less with one of his idols.

And, indeed, if he is content to call you
great, there is no reason in the world why we
should quarrel with him. It is always unsatis-
factory to talk of greatness, since there is no
exact standard to guide the judgment. The
taste of one is not the taste of another, and to
speak ill of what pleases us, or to call that great
which we do not like, would be simply to be
guilty of atrocious falsehood. Intrinsic merit
or demerit is not susceptible of mathematical
demonstration. If a reader like a book, it is
totally impossible to prove that he shouldn't
like it ; if he doesn't like it, all one's skill in logic
and ingenuity in argument will not convince
him that that book is good for him. Therefore
it is idle, and worse than idle, to discuss or
quarrel over some epithet, which to ninety-nine
out of every hundred readers has no meaning

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 239

nor intelligibility. Your best work may be
greater, or may be less than the best work of
our best novelists living and dead, but this
much, I think, might be said with the fullest
assurance, that it has as snug and secure a
corner in the hearts of the people as the work
of any writer of fiction, hardly excepting the
Wizard of the North himself.

While the public are so tolerant and indul-
gent with a popular favourite as generally to
read all his works, they have a singular predi-
lection for judging him by one, for making a
particular book the touchstone by which to try
all his other writings. The book by which
they have chosen to judge you is Lorna
Doone. But, though that is by far your most
popular book, I, for one, am not quite prepared
to say it is your best. At any rate, it cannot
make me forget that you are the author of
Springhaven and Christowell. However, since
it is the popular choice, I am quite willing
to accept it as mine also, and to make it the
ground on which briefly to examine the claim
your admirers advance for you, of being the
first of living English novelists. Without any

240 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

tedious ' prelimbinaries,' as honest farmer Snowe
would say, let it be frankly owned, then, that in
your case the public have shown themselves
marvellously good critics. They are apt to
make mistakes, — indeed, if I may be permitted
to use the expression, their forte seems to lie
in making mistakes, but in singling out such
a book as Lorna Doom for their warmest
approval, they have shown a quite surprising
acumen and accuracy of judgment. He would
be a bad reader who could not enjoy that book;
perhaps he would be a worse critic who would
condemn him for enjoying it.

What, one is often tempted to ask, is the
singular charm that fascinates us in that
Romance of Exmoor ? Is it in the style, or in
the characters, or in the scenery and action of
the story ? Doubtless it lies in all these, for it
is subtle and manifold. But if one were forced
to lay one's finger on a particular feature as the
chief one, I think it would be concluded that
that gentle and humane giant, John Ridd :
gentle and humane, yet full of a volcanic fire
and force, and capable on occasion of being
stern enough to deal out terrific justice — I say

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 241

there are obvious reasons why he should be
considered the central attraction of the book.
And, as a matter of fact, I believe he is. A
friend of mine, and one of the most discrimi-
nating of your admirers, recently spoke of the
book, as a whole, and John Ridd in particular,
as follows, and in so doing voiced the popular
verdict : * Lorna Doone is one of those books
which are national in character. The atmo-
sphere is the free air of our English moors.
The situations are always interesting, such
common occupations as sheep-shearing and
working in the fields never being prosaic. The
apotheosis of brute force is natural, or it would
be mean. It might still be mean if it were not
allied with perfect courage and undeniable
honesty and chastity. John Ridd is the type of
our perfect English manhood; he has within
him the element of all that is noble; nothing
but manliness could dwell in his great heart.
Martyrdom he would bear, but freedom he
must have. He would fight like a fiend for
freedom, but he would not be a libertine. It is
of the John Ridds of the world that you can-
not ask, " Is he a gentleman ? " Such a char-
Q

242 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

acter as Mr. Blackmore's hero stands above
all questions of the kind. He is a man.
. . . Neither can criticism touch Lorna
Doone herself. She is the proper partner of
John, and when that is said you have given her
her due.'

It might be said that she is a very perfect
heroine indeed whom criticism cannot touch —
more perfect than even that sweetest and most
perfect piece of fictitious womanhood, the mas-
terpiece of the master, the beautiful, the peerless,
the almost faultless Imogen. However, let it
be granted that Lorna Doone is the fit com-
panion for the doughty yeoman of Devon.
Though for myself, if I were disposed to be
captious, it is on Lorna I should fasten. It was
long ago observed by a wise man that a critic,
before attempting to criticise, should first of all
qualify himself for his office by lookfng at the
characters of his author from their creator's
point of view, for that without that there coulfl
be no true sympathy, and without sympathy
there could be no valuable criticism. It may be
that I have failed to fully grasp your intentions,
or fully comprehend some of the very peculiar

MR. A'. D. BLACKMORE. 243

circumstances of the story, some of the circum-
stances in which Lorna is particularly involved,
but to me she is not the most satisfactory female
character you have drawn. Nay, I hardly think
her the most satisfactory female character in the
book to which she gives her name. Though pal-
pitating with life to the finger-tips (and that, of
course, is the first essential) she is not in all
respects so fine in my eyes as either Annie or
Mrs. Ridd. There are times when I think even
Ruth Huckaback better. Perhaps, indeed, no
character so slightly sketched as Ruth was ever
truer or more intensely alive. She has a
woman's heart in that little body of hers, a heart
that swells with big passions, and such aspira-
tions as only a woman can have, and, little as
we see of her, we know her thoroughly, and
what is more, sympathise with her deeply.

Lorna Doone we also know thoroughly, and
in most of her trying situations sympathise with.
But she hardly commands complete and perfect
sympathy and admiration. How is it that a
creation, in most respects so charming, fails to
make the reader, as it were, her own, through at
least the first half of the book ? Is it because,

244 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

like Juliet, she is sometimes too much the un-
tutored child of nature to suit the modern taste,
or is it because the over-generous John, seeing
her with the eyes of infatuation, makes her just
a little too angelic, and thus sometimes lifts her
beyond the sphere of our sympathy ? Perhaps
the latter is the true explanation. It would be
interesting to find that once in a while, however
long the intervals might be, John was aware of
some slight human imperfection in his adored
inamorata. It is so human to be fallible, that
when we encounter a creature of divine perfec-
tion, much as we admire her, we can hardly feel
that bond of equality and kinship which alone
makes one child of Adam interesting to another.
Perhaps the fact that John Ridd is unable to
discover, or at any rate declines to reveal any
trifling defect in Lorna, is a strong argument
against the autobiographical form of fiction.
John is always ready enough to dwell, and
dwell with emphasis, on his own imperfections,
but it evidently is a sheer impossibility to see
any fault, hardly so much as a foible in the
goddess of the Doone Glen. Perhaps it would
be too much to expect the stern fidelity in a

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 245

lover on which Cromwell insisted in the painter
of his portrait. Nature may deal in warts and
wrinkles, but lovers obviously do not. To point
out the blemishes in one's mistress were, per-
haps, to declare one's-self a monster. Hence
it might be considered unfortunate when it falls
to the lot of a lover, so fervent and single as
John Ridd, to paint the picture of the heroine
of such a book as Lorna Doom. The painter
is so zealous a worshipper of his subject that
he forgets the shadows ; and I believe it is an
axiom of art that the shades are no less essential
to the perfect portrait than the lights. After all
the objections that might justly be taken to what
is styled the analytical school, a little more of
its spirit would have saved the delineator of
Lorna Doone from giving us an angel instead
of a woman. But let it be frankly owned that,
even with her fault of a too elaborate perfection,
Lorna Doone is a splendid creation, noble in
all her instincts, and hardly suffering in a com-
parison with any heroine of any novelist living
or dead, except, perhaps, some of the heroines
of Goethe, and one or two of Mr. Howells's.
Concerning the hero, the titanic John, there

246 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

can, I think, be but one opinion, the opinion
given by the critic I have already quoted,
namely, that he ( is the type of our perfect
English manhood.' A grand, massive character
he surely is, the embodiment of English strength,
English solidity, English generosity, English
fair-play — a right sound piece of stuff, true as
the best-tempered steel, not to be shaken by
adversity, nor spoiled by prosperity — a yeoman
of whom one would be proud to say that his
limbs were made in England. It is hard to
speak of John Ridd without going into super-
latives. He is so frank, so genial, of such vast
dimensions in mind and body, so caressing in
his gentleness, so terrific in his anger, so just,
so honourable, so fierce in his hatred of all that
is mean, so constant in his loyalty to all that is
noble, so perfectly admirable in his strength and
his weakness, that it is admiration first and criti-
cism nowhere. Some of Scott's characters would,
I dare say, equal him in strength and kindli-
ness of nature. He somewhat resembles Dandie
Dinmont. Not that there is the least trace of
imitation in him, but that great natures are
pretty much the same the wide world over, and

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 247

that when they are faithfully drawn there must
be points of similarity in the pictures. Others
of Scott's characters, too, might match him in
most of his best qualities — many of them are
much more romantic, — but since the days of
"Scott I doubt if any novelist has given us a
character fit to stand beside John Ridd, except
it might be the creators of Christian Christian -
son and Daniel Mylrea.

For one of his physical proportions John
Ridd is gentle almost beyond example. As
the saying is, he would not hurt a fly if he could
help it, and his behaviour towards Lorna and
his mother and sisters is very beautiful. At
the same time, though gentleness is admirable
in a giant, I don't know that I like Ridd's soft-
ness best. Dr. Johnson professed to like a
good hater, and I own that I am partial to a
man who knows how to be angry on occasion.
A man's mettle is shown by the manner in
which he deals with an enemy; and perhaps
no incident in Ridd's career is more impressive
than that final meeting with Carver Doone,
after the chivalrous outlaw had shot Lorna at
the altar. It was a situation to try a man ; but

248 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

John rises magnificently to the occasion. Not
long after the outlaw has taken his base re-
venge, John is able to announce that ' the black
bog had him by the feet, the sucking of the
ground drew on him like the thirsty lips of
death. In our fury we had heeded neither wet
nor dry ; nor thought of earth beneath us. I
myself might scarcely leap with the last spring
of o'erlaboured legs from the engulfing grave
of slime. He fell back with his swarthy breast
(from which my grip had rent all the clothing)
like a hummock of bog oak, standing out of the
quagmire ; and then he tossed his arms to
heaven, and they were black to the elbow. I
could only gaze and pant, for my strength was
no more than an infant's, from the fury and the
horror. Scarcely could I turn away while joint
by joint he sank from sight.' John Ridd can
be gentle, but he knows how to avenge a
wrong.

Nor with all his delicious self-depreciation,
his apparent heaviness and ignorance of life
and literature (except the Bible and Master
William Shakespeare), is he wanting in what the
Scotch call ' wut.' Like FalstafT, he hath a

MR. R. D. BLACKMORE. 249

very pleasant humour. It rises spontaneously
and unexpectedly, as the best humour always
does and must, and ripples like sunshine over
scenes which would otherwise be exceedingly
grim indeed. His accounts of his own es-
capades, especially in the early portions of the
book, are done with a delightful sense of the
charm of lightenment. But this quality of
humour is one which is ever present in all your
works. You cannot even make a parson arrest
a thief without indulging in a little jocose-
ness, just enough to give savour to the scene
without destroying the excitement of it.

Besides the quality of humour, your charac-
ters are usually endowed with very considerable
powers of observation and reflection. John
Ridd, indeed, is a second Sancho Panza in the
liberal fashion in which he lets pearls of wisdom
drop by the way. ' Now, while I was walking
daily in and out/ he says, during one of his
visits to London, ' among great crowds of men
(few of whom had any freedom from the cares
of money, and many of whom were even morbid
with a worse pest called politics) I could not be
quit of thinking how we jostle one another.

250 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

God has made the earth quite large, with a
spread of land enough for all to live on without
fighting, also a mighty spread of water, laying
hands on sand and cliff with a solemn voice in
storm time, and in the gentle weather moving
men to thoughts of equity. This as well is
full of food, being two-thirds of the world, and
reserve for devouring knowledge, by the time
the sons of men have fed away the dry land.
Yet before the land itself has acknowledged
touch of man upon one in a hundred acres,
and before one mile in ten thousand of the
exhaustless ocean has ever felt the plunge of
hook or the combing of the haul nets, lo ! we
crawl in flocks together upon the hot ground
that stings us, even as the black grubs crowd
upon the harried cattle. Surely we are given
too much to follow the tracks of each other.'

That is a bit of philosophy that might well
be conned even in this enlightened era.

One great charm, not only of Lorna Doone,
but of all your works, lies in the warmth of tone
that pervades them. Not only are your crea-
tions vital (in Springhaven they are fairly
exuberant with life), but we seem to feel the

MR. A\ D. BLACKMORE. 251

pulse of Nature in your scenic pictures as well.
At the start I asked whether the charm of
Lorna Doom lay in the style. I think it might
be answered that, if the chief pleasure in read-
ing your writings is not derivable from style, at
least your style gives no small pleasure to every
reader with any appreciation of culture. It is
a style that is peculiar and hard to analyse.
Sometimes, in its expressiveness, it reminds
one of the style of John Bunyan, at other times
its circumstantial minuteness reminds one of
Defoe's ; but, as a whole, it is infinitely richer
than Bunyan's, and infinitely more poetic than
Defoe's. Perhaps its power is shown nowhere
as well as in the descriptions of Nature which
abound in all your writings. The following, I
think, gives evidence of what is called the poetic
sense : —

' The rising of the sun was noble in the cold
and warmth of it ; peeping down the spread of
light, he raised his shoulder heavily over the
edge of gray mountain and wavering length of
upland. Beneath his gaze the dewfogs dipped,
and crept to the hollow places, then stole away
in line and column holding skirts, and clinging

252 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

subtly at the sheltering corners where rock hung
over grass-land, while the brave lines of the hills
came forth, one beyond other gliding.

' Then the woods arose in folds, like drapery
of awakened mountains, stately, with a depth of
awe and memory of the tempests. Autumn's
mellow hand was on them, as they owned
already, touched with gold and red and olive ;
and their joy towards the sun was less to a
bridegroom than a father.

* Yet before the floating impress of the woods
could clear itself, suddenly the gladsome light
leaped over hill and valley, casting amber, blue,
and purple, and a tint of rich, red rose accord-
ing to the scene they lit on, and the curtain
flung around ; yet all alike dispelling fear and
the cloven hoof of darkness ; all on the wings
of hope advancing, and proclaiming, " God is
here." '

Somehow I imagine that your success as a
portrait-painter hinders a due appreciation of
your merits as a landscape artist. It is a pity
to think that such a passage as the above should
be skipped.

MARK TWAIN.

To MR. MARK TWAIN.

SIR, — I am writing to you because I think you
would like to hear from me, and I am sending
the letter to the public press because it is
fashionable. Every man of any pretension
does that now, and the more private and con-
fidential the letter is, the more papers he sends
it to; so, as I hate to lag behind the times, I am
following the fashion. In past ages, you know
— say about the year 1492, when your illustrious
and acquisitive ancestor, John Morgan Twain,
crossed the Atlantic with Columbus, and on
landing deftly ' solde ye anchor to ye dam
sauvages from ye interior ; saying yt he hadde
found it, ye sonne of a ghun ' — about the time
this philanthropist emigrated to America to look
after the morals of the Indians by erecting a
jail and a gallows, it was not thought 'good
form' to have private letters publicly printed.
It would then have been considered affectation

263

254 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

to do anything of the sort. In those ridicu-
lously fastidious times people wrote to each
other under the strictest seal of secrecy, as if
they were conspirators plotting a general assassi-
nation of everybody worth killing, or thieves
planning a national burglary, and no one had
any fun when they called each other names, or
were any the wiser when they insinuated that
they could tell tales an they liked. We do
things better now. If this is not precisely a
simple it is an ingenuous age, and has nothing
to hide. All is done above board, and we don't
give a continental (by the way, what 's a conti-
nental ?) if the whole world, and what 's more,
the world's wife, read all we write.

To be sure there are old-fashioned people
hid away in nooks and corners of the earth,
who follow the customs of preceding ages and
still seal their letters. You hear these deluded
creatures sometimes in a stationer's shop asking
for well-gummed envelopes, as if they would
launch us back to antediluvian epochs ; but the
absurd and exclusive habit of giving a letter to
the party to whom it is addressed only is dying
out, like the belief in ghosts, and angels, and

MR. MARK TWAIN. 255

miracles, and the Bible and other old super-
stitions. Oh, the world 's getting along, never
you fear ! It 's a good deal smarter to-day than
it was fifty years ago. You may bet on that. As
the old woman said — I think she was a negress
of South Carolina — 'things is pergressin'.'
We don't take much stock in the exploded
ideas of our fathers and grandfathers. We
have ideas of our own, and are not beholden
to anybody, — not to Solomon, nor Socrates,
nor Carlyle, nor any of that tribe. The
youngest child among us wouldn't be taken in
by Moses, for example, after the dressing down
Colonel Ingersoll has given him. The old law-
giver made a great many mistakes in his day.
He was careless, you see, and his reputation 's
ruined. And then he didn't know quite so
much as he pretended. Colonel Ingersoll
knows a heap more than ever Moses dreamed
of knowing. Science didn't flourish to any
great extent amongst the Jewish Patriarchs.
Moses never was at college, and couldn't be
expected to be 'well up.' Moreover, there
were no telegraphs, or telephones, or stock
exchanges, or city councils, or lecture platforms,

256 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

or encyclopaedias, or literary men like you and
me, or debating clubs, or public-houses in his
day. The engines of civilisation were wanting
— sadly wanting ; so that it is clear at a glance
Colonel Ingersoll must of necessity be a superior
person to Moses. For what makes one man
superior to another? Education, to be sure,
and the privilege of reading such books as A
Tramp Abroad. Books like that open up the
mind and throw light on the dark recesses of
the soul. They show one the immensity of
human ignorance — in times past : they are
great civilising agents. * Worth makes the man,
and want of it the fellow,' says Pope ; but it is
clear he meant education and wrote worth only
to suit the exigencies of verse. This proves,
you see, that verse is a cramped kind of com-
position, and that all men who wish to be
understood will steer clear of it. A man can't
get in the precise meaning he would like in
verse, and it is trying to get it in that makes so
many of our poets bald. A curious essay might
be written on ' Wherefore are poets so bald ? '
though the answer might be succinctly given,
4 Because they tear out their hair.' Between

MR. MARK TWAIN. 257

the question and the answer, however, you
could get in a great deal of interesting matter,
and you might have a nice enjoyable little
chuckle at the expense of Mr. Besant, who
seriously advises young writers to write a sonnet
daily before dinner, for the purpose — not of
giving them an appetite — but of improving their
style. I think your own suggestion that authors
should begin their career by eating a couple of
medium-sized whales is more sensible ; for fish
gives one brain power, while sonnets are too
often sapless and innutritious. But I seem to
be getting away from my subject.

I was talking of the beautiful and, happily,
growing custom of having private letters printed
in books, newspapers, and public journals. It
is a beautiful custom, for it lets the reading
public — a section of mankind I greatly rever-
ence— see how smart a man is, and how neatly
he can turn his phrases, and how aptly he can
hit the other fellow on the head and knock
him sprawling, thus yielding both amusement
and edification ; so I am sending this as a kind
of open letter that people may judge impartially

R

258 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

between you and me. That's fair you see;
the public are not deprived of their rights, and
you are prevented from poking fun at my mis-
takes; for you must understand the printer
undertakes to do the square thing by this letter.
He says if my lucubration (he doesn't use the
word disrespectfully, it 's just his way of talking)
is legibly written on one side of the paper only
(it's economy to write on both sides, but he
won't have it), and doesn't contain more than
a thousand libels, nor more than two hundred
grammatical mistakes, and has some odd ideas
people would like to get a hold of, he'll
print it under a pretty and conspicuous heading,
with the name of the addressee given correctly
— to the best of his ability. (I suppose the
last clause is intended as a sort of satire on my
penmanship, which is neither, very clear nor
conspicuously elegant.) The spelling and
punctuation he undertakes to look after him-
self, and the printer's devil — no, I guess it's
the printer's reader — takes care that, on an
average, not more than half the letters in a
word attempt to stand on their heads, and that
no stray sheep, so to speak, sneak in amongst

MR. MARK TWAIN. 259

them. That 's our compact ; so that you may
say I 'm responsible for the sense and senti-
ments, and he's responsible for mostly every-
thing besides. Should you, therefore, discover
any egregious errors not directly connected
with the sense or the sentiment, you are at
liberty to publicly expose them ; but should
you discover anything ridiculous, either in the
opinions expressed or in the style of writing,
perhaps you would be good enough to com-
municate with me privately. That seems all
that need be said on that head, and now we '11
settle down to business.

I want to tell you in a plain way just what I
think of you. I am impelled to do this from a
sense of public duty, for I think there are mis-
taken notions entertained of your works. It will
be my business to set the popular judgment right.

You will, no doubt, be gratified to learn that
I have found your works very consoling in times
of trouble and affliction. And it doesn't in the
least detract from my enjoyment of them that I
clearly perceive you intended them to be, not
pathetic, but funny. After all, what matters it
what one intended ? One cannot always carry

260 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

out one's intentions, and one sometimes mis-
takes one's forte. Some people start with the
idea that they are great poets, others that they
are great novelists, others that they are great
artists, others that they are great humorists,
others that they are great sages and philosophers,
others that they are great generals, and so forth ;
and very often they carry their delusions with
them to the grave. Delusions can do no harm
there ; still it is always better to leave them in
their natural place in the great inane above.
But while this is so, one shouldn't be too hard
on people for their mistakes ; and far be it from
me to say a word in censure of you for imagin-
ing that your forte lies in raising a laugh, while
all the time it lies in drawing tears.

You are excruciatingly pathetic. Sterne,
mourning over an ass, and refusing to be com-
forted, is positively hilarious compared with you
in your account of My late Senatorial Secretary-
ship, or The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef
Contract, or Journalism in Tennessee, or Niagara.
That description of the Indian attack on you is
very touching. ' It was the greatest operation
that ever was. I simply saw a sudden flash in

MR. MARK TWAIN. 261

the air of clubs, brickbats, fists, bead-baskets,
and mocassins — a single flash, and they all
appeared to hit me at once, and no two of
them in the same place. In the next instant
the entire tribe was upon me. They tore half
the clothes off me, they broke my arms and
legs, they gave me a thump that dented the top
of my head till it would hold coffee like a
saucer ; and to crown their disgraceful proceed-
ings, and add insult to injury, they threw me
over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet.' Nor is
that the most touching part of it ; for after you
had gone round and round forty-four times in
the eddy at the foot of the falls, ' a man walked
down, and sat down, and put a pipe in his
mouth, and lit a match, and followed me with
one eye, and kept the other on the match, while
he sheltered it in his hands from the wind,'
without offering to render you any assistance
whatever. 'Presently a puff of wind blew it
(the match) out. The next time I swept round,
he said —

' " Got a match ? "

' " Yes, in my other vest. Help me out,
please."

262 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

1 " Not for Joe."

' When I came round again, I said : " Excuse
the seemingly impertinent curiosity of a drown-
ing man, but will you explain this singular
conduct of yours ? "

' " With pleasure. I am the coroner. Don't
hurry on my account. I can wait for you. But
I wish I had a match."

' I said : " Take my place, and I '11 go and
get you one."

' He declined. This lack of confidence on
his part created a coldness between us, and
from that time forward I avoided him. It was
my idea, in case anything happened to me, to
so time the occurrence as to throw my custom
into the hands of the opposition coroner over
on the American side.

' At last a policeman came along, and arrested
me for disturbing the peace by yelling at the
people on shore for help. The judge fined me,
but I had the advantage of him. My money
was in my pantaloons, and my pantaloons were
with the Indians.

' Thus I escaped. I am now lying in a very
critical condition. At least I am lying, anyway,

MR. MARK TWAIN. 263

critical or not critical. I am hurt all over ; but
I cannot tell the full extent yet, because the
doctor is not done taking the inventory. He
will make out my manifest this evening. How-
ever, thus far he thinks that only sixteen of my
wounds are fatal.'

Was there ever a more touching tale of
cruelty more wanton, or more heroically borne.
The injustice is colossal. Not only were you
hurt all over, not only did you sustain sixteen
fatal wounds — perhaps more, but sixteen for a
certainty — but you got wet, probably indeed
drenched, and thus ran a serious risk of getting
your joints askew with rheumatism. The In-
dians were brutes, the coroner was a brute, the
policeman was a brute, the judge was a brute.
There is no evidence that you exaggerate ; your
story has every appearance of truth \ and being
true and simply told, without literary flourishes,
or any attempt to draw on the reservoirs of the
reader, it is all the more affecting. My eyes
are suffused with tears as I write. I feel my
heart swelling and welling with soft dewy pity
(that 's a pet phrase from the poets), and I am
drawn towards you in the bonds of brotherhood.

264 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

You are a human creature like myself, alas !
you are too, too human, and your mountain of
troubles is too, too solid, and refuses to melt ;
and the canon of destiny is aimed straight at
you (kindly compare with the speech of Ham-
let, the rollicking Prince of Denmark). You
know what it is to be in tribulation ; you know
what it is not only to suffer in the body, but in
the soul — in the soul, sir. Ay, that is where
the rub is most poignantly felt. Nobody can
see into the soul; it is a great vacuum, an
invisible something or other that folks are not
very sure of, but it hurts awfully sometimes.
In speaking of it you cannot say, with any
semblance of truth, that the sting goes to the
quick, for there is no quick ; nor the dagger to
the marrow, for there is no marrow ; but, ugh !
doesn't a wound in it make you cry out ?

You know the acute suffering of the soul, and
it is because of this that I always recommend
your books to people in sorrow in preference to
books that are avowedly devotional. I specially
recommend them to such as have suffered
bereavement — such as have lost darling pugs,
or dear little tame rats, or gentle pet cats that

MR. MARK TWAIN. 265

have, perhaps, been horribly mutilated by vicious
steel traps when walking abroad to pay social
visits in the cool of the evening. I have seen
these bereaved and inconsolable ones palpably
falling into a decline; I have known their
friends to get estimates from undertakers in sad
anticipation of what was coming ; I have known
the poor unfortunates to take leave of their
families and fold their hands and await the
inevitable; and I have gone and put one of
your works into their hands, and lo ! as if by
magic,, they began to mend. You can never
know the number of the people you have
snatched from death and the grave. You are
the greatest physician alive. Your medicines
work cures that are perfectly miraculous. O
sir, the world owes you a debt of gratitude it
can never, never, never repay !

Let us say that some estimable lady has lost
a pet pug that has been the solace of her life
for ever so many years. The poor little affec-
tionate, docile thing has, perhaps, died from
want of breath, the windpipe having closed
from a surplus of fat — an awful death, a most
affecting death even to think of. Naturally the

266 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

estimable lady is stricken beyond expression.
Her grief is too great for tears. The heart has
been blasted. The seat of the affections has
been rocked like a ship in a hurricane. It may
be that the throne of reason itself has been
invaded. What are you to expect in such a
case ? It seems hopeless. The hand of death
is on the estimable owner of the late lamented
pug. She is doomed. She must go. That is
the natural supposition. But some one puts
one of your touching and tender books into her
hands. At first she reads languidly and without
interest, feeling that she has done with this
world; but by-and-by, and almost unconsciously,
she begins to turn the pages with some show
of enjoyment, then her feelings are touched,
then a nice cooling little stream begins to course
down either cheek, and the hot eyes have a
refreshing bath, and the heavy heart is relieved
of its pent-up— what the deuce is pent-up in the
heart? Never mind, the pent-up heart is
relieved, and the estimable lady, feeling that she
is not alone in her sorrow, that you have suffered
before her, picks herself up, puts on her best
bonnet and her sweetest smile, and goes to look

J/A'. MARK TWAIN. 267

up a successor to her dear departed. And that
is why I recommend your books.

But a curious thing happened to me lately.
A friend of mine was going to a funeral, and,
having to travel a considerable distance by rail,
he thought unto himself that he would like
something to read. Now he imagined it
would be rather disrespectful to the departed
to take up a secular newspaper, so he con-
sulted me.

* I can give you what you want exactly,' I
said, and with cheerful confidence put The
New Pilgrim's Progress into his hand. ' 1
know that will suit you,' I said, as he stepped
into the train. ' If you 're not as sober and
solemn as a judge pronouncing a death sentence
when you reach your destination, you may call
me a Dutchman.' Now the funny thing is he
never has called me a Dutchman, but two days
later I received the book back by post, with a
note of three lines couched in very formal style,
intimating that he had a natural dislike to being
made the butt of a clumsy and blasphemous
jest. I demanded what he meant, and this is
what he said, 'Do you call that gigantic and

268 LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

persistent humbug religious? Why, the man
is perfectly incapable of writing the truth. He
can't describe a single thing as he saw it, or as
it really is. He says he acted as second to
Gambetta in a duel with some fool or other,
and actually proposed brickbats at three-quar-
ters of a mile. The thing is ridiculous ; it 's
monstrous ; it 's simply a lie, — that 's what it is.
Again, he says that once during a thunderstorm,
by actual count, the lightning struck at his
establishment — his establishment, indeed ! —
seven hundred and sixty-four times in forty
minutes, and tripped on a rod and slipped down
some spiral twist and shot into the earth before
it had time to be surprised at the way the thing
was done. Isn't that a likely story ? And again,
when he is in Rome (where they should have
kept him) he gives it out as a sober fact that
he discovered a theatrical programme nearly
two thousand years old among the ruins of the
Coliseum, and that this bit of paper was as fresh
as the day it was printed. To make the lie
complete he should have said it was fresher.
And then when he is in the Holy Land — mind
you, in the Holy Land — his silly blasphemies

MK. MARK TWAIN. 269

might be pardoned elsewhere on the score of
weakness of intellect, but in the Holy Land they
are unforgivable, — well, what do you think this
fine writer of yours asserts as a solemn fact ? He
asserts that outside a certain mosque is a minia-
ture temple, which marks the spot where David
and Goliath used to sit and judge the people.
Did ever sane man, professing to be a Christian,
and having some knowledge of his Bible, print
such a statement as that before. Such colossal
ignorance astounded me. Nor is that all, nor
half, nor quarter, nor the tenth part, nor the
hundredth, nor the millionth of his absurdities.
He tells us, for instance, about a horse he
owned by the name of 'Jericho,' and calmly
remarks it was a mare. Well, this mare or
horse, or mule or ass, or whatever it was, had a
practice of fighting the flies with its heels,
because it had no tail, and it used also to
reach round and bite the rider's legs. He
says he didn't care for that, only he didn't like
to see a horse too sociable. I ask you, is that
likely ? I ask you, is it sensible ? But why go
on citing instances of the man's monstrosity?
He is utterly unreliable; he is a fraud; you

2;o LETTERS TO LIVING AUTHORS.

don't know when he is attempting to palm
off some gigantic falsehood as a fact. And yet
this is the writer you would recommend to one
in distress ; this is the writer you would put
into my hand when I was going away to a dear
friend's funeral. Get out of my house, sir ; let
me never see your face again — go out of this,

and go to with your Mark Twain.' That

is how the interview closed. I tried to reason
with him. I tried to show him that you some-
times attempted a little jest, and that when a
man intends a thing as a joke he should not
be harshly criticised for unveracity, even when
the joke is not so obvious as to make one
laugh. But he declined to listen to me, and as
I noticed a curious restlessness about the toe
of his right boot, I departed. We have not
spoken since.

But his was an exceptional case, and in
general I find, as already stated, that your works
are very soothing. With old ladies and gentle-
men, with no perception of humour and no
liking for it, they are particularly successful.
An old maiden lady who had just buried her
thirty-seventh cat recently said to me, * Heaven

MR. MARK TWAIN. 271

bless Mr. Twain ; he made me cry for two
hours, — two long hours ; it was so delicious.
He 's not frivolous, you know, like some you
read ; he never attempts to make you laugh
— oh, he's so nice and feeling !'

THE END.

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW

AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS

WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN
THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY
WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH
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5 57") 70

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